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BOSTON: 
LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY 

1852. 






Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1852, 

By Little, Brown, and Company, 

in the Clerk's office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts. 



rniNTED BY II. O. IIODGIITON AND COMrANY. 



TO 



THE HONORABLE 



JOHN H. CLIFFORD, LL.D. 

ATTORNEY-GENERAL OF MASSACHUSETTS, 

My DEAR Sir, 

I AM sensible how little there is in this volume, to entitle it 
to be made the subject of any formal dedication. But I am 
unwilling to forego the opportunity which it affords me, of 
testifying how highly I value the cordial relations of friendship 
and confidence, which have existed between us without inter- 
mission, since we first entered public life together in 1834. 
Believe me. My Dear Sir, 

With sincere regard and respect. 
Always faithfully, Yours, 

ROBERT C. WINTHROP. 

BOSTOK, May 12, 1852. 



rEEFACE. 



Some circumstances, connected with the progress and 
close of my late Congressional career, have induced me to 
comply, not altogether unwillingly, with the suggestion of 
friends, — that whatever I have said on public questions, 
should Be placed within the convenient reach and reference 
of such as may care to know any thing about my course. 

I have ventured to think, too, that this volume would not" 
be entirely unacceptable to the people of Massachusetts, 
and particularly to the people of Boston, to whom I have 
been indebted for whatever opportunities I have enjoyed, 
and in whose service most of these Addresses and Speeches 
were made. 

They are given here just as they were delivered, and 
many of them printed, at the time, — with no other change 
than the correction of a few inaccuracies in matter of form, 
or, it may be, in matter of foot. They thus contain, — not 
what I might have said, or might now say, — but what I 
actually did say, on the subjects to which they relate, during 
sixteen or seventeen years of public employment. 

I will not deny, that, in revising the proof-sheets, I have 



a* 



VI PREFACE. 

foimd, here and there, an opinion of men or of things, 
which has been in some degree modified by subsequent 
events. And there may be a few strong partisan expressions, 
especially in some of the earlier political speeches, which 
might not altogether appi'ove themselves to my maturer 
judgment. But there is nothing of substantial principle 
which I desire to revoke, and, upon the whole, I have 
preferred to let the record stand, as it has been made 
up from time to time, rather than allow room for the 
imputation that I had suppressed or altered any thing, 
to suit any mere change of political circumstances or of 
public sentiment. 

The size of the volume has compelled me to omit many 
things which I desired and intended to insert, but I have no 
fear that there will be any complaint on this score from any 
cj^uarter. • 

KOBERT C. WlNTIIROP* 
BosTOX, Mav, 1852. 



CONTENTS. 



THE PILGRIM FATHERS. 

An Address, delivered before tlie New England Society, in the City of 
New York, December 23, 1839 1 

THE IXFLUEXCE OF COMMERCE. 

An Address, delivered before tlie Boston Mercantile Library Association, 
on the Occasion of their Twenty-fifth Anniversary, October 15, 1845 . 39 

NATIOXAL MONUMENT TO WASHINGTON. 

An Oration delivered at the Seat of Government, on the Occasion of lay- 
ino^the Corner-Stoneofthe National Monument to Washington, July 4, 1848 70 

THE LIFE AND SERVICES OF JAMES BOWDOIN. 

An Address delivered before the IMaine Historical Society, at Bowdoin 
Colleo-e, on the Afternoon of the Annual Commencement, September 5, 
1849 • • • »0 

FREE SCHOOLS AND FREE GOVERNMENTS. 

A Lecture delivered before the Boston Lyceum, December 20, 1838 . . 137 

THE BIBLE. 

An Address delivered at the Annual Meeting of the Massachusetts Bible 
Society in Boston, May 28, 1849 1^5 

COMPENSATION FOR THE DESTRUCTION OF THE URSULINE CONVENT. 

A Speech delivered in the House of Representatives of Massachusetts, 
March 12, 1835 . •^ ^"^^ 



Vlll CONTENTS. 



THE TESTIMONY OF INFIDELS. 



A Speech delivered in the House of Eepresentatives of Massachusetts, 
February 11, 183G 187 

PROTECTIOX TO DOMESTIC INDUSTRY. 

A Speech deUvered in the House of Representatives of Massachusetts, 
February 15, 1837 200 

CONGRATULATIONS TO THE WHIGS OF NEW YORK. 

A Speech delivered at Masonic Hall, New York, November 22, 1837 .221 

THE SUB-TREASURY SYSTEM. • 

A Speech delivered in the House of Eepresentatives of Massachusetts, 
March 2G, 1838 227 

THE VOTES OF INTERESTED MEMBERS. 

A Decision pronounced In the House of Eepresentatives of Massachusetts, 
February 19, 1840 273 

REPLY TO A VOTE OF THANES. 

An Acknowledgment of a Vote of Thanks to the Speaker, passed by the 
House of Eepresentatives of Massachusetts, March 21, 1840 . . . 285 

THE PROCEEDS OF THE PUBLIC LANDS. 

A Speech delivered in the House of Eepresentatives of the United States, 
July 2, 1841 289 

THE POLICY OF DISCRIMINATING DUTIES. 

A Speech delivered in the House of Eepresentatives of the United States, 
December 30, 1841 3r)(; 

THE IMPRISONMENT OF FREE COLORED SEAMEN. 

I A Report maile to the House of Representatives of the United States, Jan- 
uary 20, 1843 o^j 

THE SAFE KEEPING OP THE PUBLIC MONEYS. 

A Spcccli delivered In the House of Eepresentatives of the United States, 
January 25, 1843 5^3 



CONTENTS. IX 

THE CREDIT OF MASSACHUSETTS VINDICATED. 

A Speech delivered at Faneuil Hall, at a Meeting of the "VVhigs of Boston, 
October 12, 1843 375 



THE EIGHT OF PETITION. 

A Speech delivered in the House of Repesentatives of the United States, 
January 23, 1844 389 



THE OREGON QUESTION AND THE TREATY OF WASHINGTON. 

A Speech delivered in the House of Representatives of the United States, 
March 18, 1844 415 



THE ANNEXATION OP TEXAS. 

A Speech delivered in the House of Representatives of the United States, 
January 6, 1845 438 



GREAT BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES. 

A Speech delivered in the House of Representatives of the United States, 
February 1, 1845 464 



ARBITRATION OF THE OREGON QUESTION. 

A Speech delivered in the House of Representatives of the United States, 
January 3, 1846 481 



KIVER AND HARBOR IMPROVEMENTS. 

x\ Speech delivered in the House of Representatives of the United States, 
March 12, 1846 500 



THE AVANTS OF THE GOVERNMENT AND THE WAGES OF LABOR. 

A Speech delivered in the House of Representatives of the United States, 
June 26, 1846 523 



WHIG PREDICTIONS AND WHIG POLICY. 

A Speech delivered at the State Convention of the Whigs of Massachusetts, 
in Faneuil Hall, September 23, 1846 551 



CONTENTS. 



THE "WAR WITH MEXICO. 

A Speech delivered in the House of Representatives of the United States 
Januarv 8, 1847 . . • 



564 



THE COKQUEST OF MEXICAN TERRITORY. 

A Speech deUvered in the House of Representatives of the United States, 
Fcbruary22, 1847 ^^^ 

* ADDRESS OX TAKIXG THE CHAIR AS SPEAKER. 

An Address deUvered in the House of Representatives of the United States, 
December 6, 1847 

THE DEATH OF JOIIX QUIXCY ADAMS. 

iVnuouncement of the Death of Ex-President Adams to the House of Repre- 
sentatives of the United States, February 24, 1848 . . • -614 

HORTICULTURE. 

A Speech at the Festival of the INlassachusetts Horticultural Society in 
Faneuil Hall, Boston, September 22, 1848 C16 

THE CITY OF WASHIXGTOX. 

A Speech made at a Complimentary Dinner given \>\ Citizens of Washing- 
ton to Members of the Thirtieth Congress, December 2Q, 1848 . .620 



REPLY TO A VOTE OF THAXKS. 

A Speech delivered in the House of Representatives of the United States, 
on the final Adjournment of the Thirtieth Congi-ess, IMarch, 4, 1849 G24 

PERSOXAL A'lXDICATIOX. 

A Speech delivered in the House of Representatives of the United States, 
Fcbruar}'21, 1850 . . .603 

/' 

THE DEATH OF JOHX C. CALHOUX. 

A Speech delivcx'cd in the House of Representatives of the United States, 
on the Announcement of Mr. Calhoun's Death, April 1, 1850 . .651 



CONTENTS. XI 

THE ADMISSION OF CALIFORNIA, AND THE ADJUSTMENT OF THE 

SLAVERY QUESTION. 

A Speccli delivered In tlie House of Representatives of the United States, 
May 8, 1850 654 

I 

THE DEATH OF PRESIDENT TAYLOR. 

A Speecli delivered in the House of Representatives of tlic United States, 
on the Announcement of the Death of General Taylor, July 10, 1850 693 

THE DEATH OP DANIEL P. KING. * 

Remarks made In the House of Representatives of the United States, on the 
Announcement of the Death of Mr. Iving, a Representative from INIassa- 
chusetts, July 27, 1850 697 

TO THE PEOPLE OF BOSTON. 

Letter of Acknowledgment to the People of Boston on retiring from their 
Service, July 30, 1850 699 

THE BOUNDARY OF NEW IMEXICO AND TEXAS. 

Remarks in the Senate of the United States, on the Bill for Organizing a 
Territorial Government in New Mexico, August 14, 1850 . . .701 



PROTEST AGAINST THE ADMISSION OF CALIFORNIA. 

Remarks in the Senate of the United States on receiving a Protest from a 
number of Southern Senators, August 14, 1850 70S 



THE FUGITIVE SLAVE LAAV. 

Remarks in the Senate of the United States, August 19, 1850 . . .713 

THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE. 

A Speech made at a Public Dinner given to Amin Bey by the Merchants of 
Boston, November 4, 1850 720 

RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION OF THE YOUNG. 

A Speech made at the Anniversary Meeting of the AVarren Street Chapel 
Association, on Sunday Evening, April 27, 1851 723 



xii CONTENTS. 

THE AMERICAN REVOLTJTIOX. 

A Speech delivered at the Annual City Dinner in Faneuil Hall, July 4, 



iSjl 



729 



RAILROAD JUBILEE. 



A Speech delivered at the Tavilion on Boston Conamon at the Celebration 
of the Completion of the Canada and Boston Railroads, September 19,1851 737 



AGRICULTURE. 



A Speech delivered at the Dinner of the Middlesex Agricultural Society, 
at Lowell, September 24, 1851 743 



THE MECHANIC ARTS. 



A Speech deUvered at the Festival of the Massachusetts Charitable Mechanic 
Association, in Faneuil Hall, October 1, 1851 748 



AGRICULTURAL EDUCATION. 



A Speech delivered at the Dinner of the Hampshire, Hampden, and 
Franklin Agricultural Society, at Northampton, October 9, 1851 . . 753 



MASSACHUSETTS IN 1775. 



A Speech delivered at the Celebration of the Completion of a Monument 
to Isaac Davis, Abner Ilosmer, and James Hayward, at Acton, October 
29, 1851 ... ....... 7G0 



THE PILGEIM FATHERS. 



AN ADDRESS, DELIVERED BEFORE THE NEW ENGLAND SOCIETY, IN THE 
CITY OP NEW YORK, DECEMBER 23, 1S39. 



Towards the close of the year 1558, about two hundred and 
eighty-one years ago, a little more than nine times the period 
which has been commonly assigned as the term of a generation, 
and only four times the threescore years and ten which have 
been divinely allotted to the life of man, a virgin Princess 
ascended the throne of England. Inheriting, together with the 
throne itself, a full measure of that haughty and overbearing 
spirit which characterized the royal race from which she sprung, 
she could not brook the idea of any partition of her power, or 
of any control over her person. She seemed resolved that that 
race should end with her, and that the crown which it had so 
nobly won on Bosworth Field should seek a new channel of 
succession, rather than it should be deprived, in her person, and 
through any accident of her sex, of one jot or tittle of that high 
prerogative which it had now enjoyed for nearly a century. She 
seemed to prefer, not only to hold, herself, a barren sceptre — no 
heir of her's succeeding — but even to let that sceptre fall into 
the hands of the issue of a hated, persecuted, and finally mur- 
dered rival, rather than risk the certainty of wielding it herself, 
with that free and unembarrassed arm which befitted a daughter 
of the Tudors. 

Accordingly, no sooner had she grasped it, and seated herself 
securely upon the throne of her fathers, than she declared to her 
suppliant Commons — who doubtless presumed that they could 
approach a Queen of almost six-and-twenty, with no more 

1 



2 THE PILGRIM FATHERS. 

agreeable petition, than iliat she would graciously condescend 
to select for herself an help-meet in the management of the 
mighty interests which had just been intrusted to her — that 
England was her husband ; that she had wedded it with the 
marriage ring upon her finger, placed there by herself with that 
design on the very morning of her coronation ; that while a pri- 
vate person she had always declined a matrimonial engagement, 
ret'arding it even then as an incumbrance, but that much more 
did she persist in this opinion now that a great kingdom had 
been committed to her charge ; and that, for one, she wished no 
higher character or fairer remembrance of her should be trans- 
mitted to posterity, when she should pay the last debt to nature, 
than to have this inscription engraved on her tombstone: — 
«' Here lies Elizabetl;, who lived and died a Maiden Queen." 

In the purpose thus emphatically declared at her accession, 
the Queen of whom I speak persevered to her decease. Scorn- 
ing the proverbial privilege of her sex, to change their minds at 
will upon such a subject, and resisting the importunities of a 
thousand suitors, she realized that vision of a Midsummer 
Night's Dream, which was so exquisitely unfolded to her by the 
immortal Dramatist of her day : 

" I saw, 
Flyin;^ between the cokl moon and the earth, 
Cupiil all arm'd : a certain aim he took 
At a fair Vestal, throned by the "West ; 
And loosed his love-shaft smartly from his bo^v, 
As it should pierce a hundred thousand hearts: — 
But I ini;,'ht sec youn^ C^upid's fiery sliaft 
Quench'd in the chaste beams of the watery moon; 
And the imperial vot'ress passed on, 
In maiden meditation, fancy-free." 

But Elizabeth was not quite content to wait for a tombstone, 
on which to inscribe this purpose and its fulfilment. Proclaimed, 
as it annually was, through the whole length and breadth of the 
Old World, from almost every corner of which proposals of a 
character to shake and change it were continually poured in 
upon her, — she resolved to engrave it once and forever upon 
the New World also, where as yet there was no civilized suitor 
to tease her with his pretensions, whose very existence had been 



THE PILGRIM FATHERS. 3 

discovered less than a century before by Christopher Columbus, 
and the Northern Continent of which had been brought within 
the reach of her own prerogative by the subsequent discovery of 
Sebastian Cabot. To that whole continent she gave the name 
of Virginia ; and at her death, after a reign of five-and-forty 
years, that whole continent, through all its yet unmeasured lati- 
tudes and longitudes, from the confines of Labrador to the 
Mexican Gulf, was known by no other title, than that which 
thus marked it as the dominion of a Maiden Queen. 

But it was that Queen's dominion only in name. Four 
times, indeed, she had essayed to people it and plant her ban- 
ners there. But in vain. Sir Humphrey Gilbert, to whom the 
first patent for this purpose was granted, being compelled to 
return prematurely to England by the disasters he had expe- 
rienced on the coast of Newfoundland, was lost in a storm on 
the homeward passage, and all that survived of his gallant en- 
terprise, was that sublime exclamation, as he sat in the stern of 
his sinking bark — " It is as near to Heaven by sea as by land." 
By the resolute and undaunted efforts of his illustrious brother- 
in-law, Sir Walter Raleigh, however, three separate companies 
of colonists were afterwards conducted to the more southern 
parts of the continent, and each in succession commenced a 
settlement at Roanoke Bay. But two of them perished on the 
spot, without leaving behind them even so much as the means 
of ascertaining whether they had owed their destruction to force 
or to famine; — while the third, which, indeed, was the first in 
order, within a year from its departure, returned in disgust to 
its native land. And the whole result of Virginia colonization 
and V^irginia commerce, upon which such unbounded hopes of 
glory and of gain had been hung by Raleigh, and cherished by 
the Queen, had hitherto consisted in the introduction into Eng- 
land, by this last named band of emigrants returning home in 
despair, of a few hundreds of tobacco, and in Queen Elizabeth 
herself becoming one of Raleigh's pupils in that most maidenly 
and most queenly accomplishment, — smoking; a pipe. Not one 
subject did Elizabeth leave at her death in that wide spread 
continent, which she had thus destined to the honor of perpetu- 
ating the memory of her haughty and ambitious virginity. 



4 THE PILGRIM FATHERS. 

\Vithlii r\ year or two past, a second Maiden Queen has as- 
cended the tlirone which the first exchanged for a grave in 1603. 
And wlien she casts her eye back, as she can scarcely fail fre- 
quently to do, to the days of her illustrious prototype, and com- 
pares the sceptre which Klixabcth so boldly swayed for nearly 
half a century with that which trembles in her girlish hand, she 
may console herself with the reflection, that if the strength and 
potency of her own are greatly inferior, its reach and sweep are, 
practically at least, vastly more extended. She sees the imme- 
diate successor to Elizabeth, uniting the crowns of England and 
Scotland, and preparing the way for that perfect consolidation 
of the two countries which another century was destined to 
complete. Ireland, too, she finds no longer held by the tenure 
of an almost annual conquest, but included in the bonds of the 
same great union. AVhile beyond the boundaries of the Impe- 
rial Homestead, she beholds her power bestriding the world like 
a Colossus, a foot on either hemisphere ; in one, military posts 
and colonial possessions hailing her accession and acknowledg- 
ing her sway, which were without even a name or local habita- 
tion in the history of the world, as Raleigh wrote it; and in 
the other, a company of adventurers which Elizabeth chartered 
a few years before her death, to try the experiment of a trade 
with the East Indies by the newly discovered passage round the 
Cape of Good Hope, converted from a petty mercantile corpo- 
ration into a vast military empire, and holding in her name 
and expending in her service territorial dominions and revenues 
equal to those of the most powerful independent monarchies. 

But where is Virginia? Where is the " ancient dominion" 
upon which her great Exemplar inscribed the substance of that 
" maiden meditation " which even now, mayhap, is mingled 
with the weightier cares of majesty in her own breast? Have 
all attempts to plant and colonize it proved still unsuccessful? 
lis it still unreclaimed from original barbarism — still only the 
abode of wolves and wild men ? And why is it not found on 
the map of the liritish possessions — why not comprised in the 
catalogue of llcr .Majesty's Colonies? Two centuries and a 
third ago only, when l-]lizal)eth quilted the throne, it was there, 
unsettled indeed, and with not a civilized soul upon its soil, but 



THE PILGRIM FATHERS. 

opening its boundless territories to the adventure and enterprise 
of the British people, and destined, to all human appearances, 
to be one day counted aniong the brightest jewels in the crowns 
of the British princes. Why is it not now seen sparkling in 
that which encircles her own brow ? 

If we might imagine the youthful Victoria, led along by the 
train of reflections which we have thus suggested, and snatch- 
ing a moment from the anxious contemplation of colonies which 
she is in immediate danger of losing, to search after those which 
have been lost to her already, — if we might imagine her turn- 
ing back the page of History to the period of the first Stuart, to 
discover what became of the Virginia of Elizabeth after her 
death, how it was finally planted, and how it passed from be- 
neath the sceptre of her successors, — if we might be indulged 
in a far less natural imagination, and fancy ourselves admitted 
at this moment to the royal presence, and, with something more 
even than the ordinary boldness of Yankee curiosity, peering 
over the royal shoulder, as, impatient at the remembrance of 
losses sustained, and still more so at the prospect of like losses 
impending, she hurries over the leaves on which the fortunes of 
that Virginia are recorded, and the fortunes of all other Vir- 
ginias foreshadowed, what a scene should we find unfolding 
itself to her view ! 

She sees, at a glance, a permanent settlement effected there, 
and James the First, more fortunate than his mother's murderer, 
inscribing a name not on a mere empty territory only, but on 
an organized and inhabited town. A page onward, she per- 
ceives a second and entirely separate settlement accomplished 
in a widely distant quarter of the continent, and the cherished 
title of New England is now presented to her view. Around 
these two original footholds of civilization, she sees a hardy, 
enterprising, and chivalrous people rapidly clustering, while 
other settlements are simultaneously established along the terri- 
tory which divides them. Thousands of miles of coast, with 
their parallel ranges of interior country, are soon seen thickly 
studded over with populous and flourishing plantations. The 
population of them all, which had run up from to 300,000 by 
the close of the seventeenth century, is found advanced to more 
1* 



6 THE PILGRIM FATHERS. 

than two millions by the close of the eighteenth. And another 
page displays to her kindling gaze thirteen as noble colonies as 
the sun ever shone upon, with nearly three millions of inhabit- 
ants, all acknowledging their allegiance to the British Crown, 
all contributing their unmatched energies to the support and 
extension of British commerce, and all claiming, as their most 
valued birthright, the liberties and immunities of the British 
Constitution. Ah I did the volume but end there ! But she 
perceives, as she proceeds, that in a rash hour those liberties and 
immunities were denied them. Resistance, War, Independence, 
in letters of blood, now startup bewilderingly to her sight. And 
where the Virginia of Elizabeth was, two centuries and a third 
ago, a waste and howling wilderness upon which civilized man 
was as yet unable to maintain himself a moment, she next 
beholds an independent and united Nation of sixteen millions 
of freemen, with a commerce second only to her own, and with 
a country, a constitution, an entire condition of men and things, 
which from all previous experience in the growth of nations, 
ought to have been the fruit of at least a thousand years, and 
would have been regarded as the thrifty produce of a Millen- 
nium well employed I 

Gentlemen of the New England Society and Fellow-Citizens 
of New York, of this wonderful rise and progress of our country, 
from the merely nominal and embryo existence which it had 
acquired at the dawn of the seventeenth century, to the mature 
growth, the substantial prosperity, the independent greatness 
and national grandeur in which it is now beheld, we this day 
commemorate a main, original spring. The twenty-second of 
December, 1620, was not the mere birthday of a town or a 
colony. Had it depended for its distinction upon events like 
these, it would have long ago ceased to be memorable. The 
town which it saw planted, is indeed still in existence, standing 
on the very site which the Pilgrims selected, and containing 
within its limits an honest, industrious, and virtuous people, not 
unworthy of the precious scenes and hallowed associations to 
whose enjoyment they have succeeded. But possessing, as it 
did originally, no peculiar advantages, either of soil, locality, or 



THE PILGRIM FATHERS. i 

climate, and outstripped, as it naturally has been, in wealth, 
size, population, and importance, by thousands of other towns 
all over the continent, it would scarcely suffice to perpetuate 
beyond its own immediate precincts, the observance, or even the 
remembrance of a day, of whose doings it constituted the only 
monument ; while the colony of whose establishment that day 
was also the commencement, has long since ceased to enjoy any 
separate political existence. As if to rescue its founders from 
the undeserved fortune of being only associated in the memory 
of posterity with the settlers of individual States, and to insure 
for them a name and a praise in all quarters of the country, 
the Colony of New Plymouth never reached the dignity of in- 
dependent sovereignty to which almost all its sister colonies 
were destined, and is now known only as the fraction of a 
county of a Commonwealth which was founded by other hands. 
Yes, the event which occurred two hundred and nineteen years 
ago yesterday, was of wider import than the confines of New 
Plymouth. The area of New England, greater than that of 
Old England, has yet proved far too contracted to comprehend 
all its influences. They have been coextensive with our country. 
They have pervaded our continent. They have passed the 
Isthmus. They have climbed the farthest Andes. They have 
crossed the ocean. The seeds of the Mayflower, wafted by the 
winds of Heaven, or borne in the Eagle's beak, have been scat- 
tered far and wide over the Old World as well as over the New. 
The suns of France or Italy have not scorched them. The 
frosts of Russia have not nipped them. The fogs of Germany 
have not blighted them. They have sprung up in every lati- 
tude, and borne fruit, some twenty, some fifty, and some an 
hundred fold. And though so often struck down and crushed 
beneath the iron tread of arbitrary power, they are still inera- 
dicably imbedded in every soil, and their leaves are still destined 
to be for the healing of all nations. O, could only some one of 
the pious fathers, whose wanderings were this day brought to 
an end, be permitted to enter once more upon these earthly 
scenes ; could he, like the pious father of ancient Rome, guided 
by some guardian spirit and covered with a cloud, be conducted, 
I care not to what spot beneath the sky, how might he exclaim. 



8 THE PILGRIM FATHERS. 

as he gazed, not with tears of anguish, but of rapture, not on 
some empty picture of Pilgrim sorrows and Pilgrim struggles, 
but upon the living realities of Pilgrim influence and Pilgrim 
achievement — " Quis locus— Qua; reg-io — Wlmt place, what 
region upon earth is there, which is not full of the products of 
our labors I Where, where has not some darkness been enlight- 
ened, some oppression alleviated, some yoke broken or chain 
loosened, some better views of God's worship or man's duty, of 
divine law or human rights, been imparted by our principles or 
inspired by our example I " 

This country, Fellow-Citizens, has in no respect more entirely 
contravened all previous experience in human affairs, than in 
affordini? materials for the minutest details in the history of its 
earliest ages. I should rather say, of its earliest daps, for it has 
had no ages, and days have done for it what ages have been 
demanded for elsewhere. But whatever the periods of its exist- 
ence may be termed, they are all historical periods. Its whole 
birth, growth, being, are before us. We are not compelled to 
resort to cunningly devised fables to account either for its origin 
or advancement. We can trace back the current of its career 
to the very rock from which it first gushed. 

Yet how like a fable does it seem, how even " stranger than 
fiction," to speak of the event which we this day commemorate, 
as having exerted any material influence on the destinies of our 
country, much more as having in any degree affected the exist- 
ing condition of the world I This ever-memorable, ever-glorious 
landing of the Pilgrims, how, where, by what numbers, under 
what circumstances, was it made ? From what invincible Ar- 
mada did the Fathers of New England disembark ? With 
what array of disciplined armies did they line the shore ? 
Warned by the fate which had so frequently befallen other colo- 
nists on the same coast, what batteries did they bring to defend 
them from the incursions of a merciless foe ; what stores to pre- 
serve them from the invasions of a not more merciful famine ? 

In the whole history of colonization, ancient or modern, no 
feebler company either in point of numbers, armament, or sup- 
plies, can be found, than that which landed, on the day we com- 
memorate, on these American shores. Forty-one men, — of 



THE PILGRIM FATHERS. V 

whom two, at least, came over only in the capacity of servants 
to others, and who manifested their title to be counted among 
the Fathers of New England within a few weeks after their 
arrival, by fighting with sword and dagger the first duel which 
stands recorded on the annals of the New World, for which they 
were adjudged to be tied together neck and heels and so to lie 
for four-and-twenty hours without meat or drink; — forty-one 
men, — of whom one more, at least, had been shuffled into the 
ship's company at London, nobody knew by whom, and who 
even more signally vindicated his claim, no long time after, to be 
enumerated among this pious Pilgrim band, by committing the 
first murder and gracing the first gallows of which there is any 
memorial in our colonial history; — forty-one men, all told, — 
with about sixty women and children, one of whom had been 
born during the passage, and another in the harbor before they 
landed, — in a single ship, of only one hundred and eighty tons 
burden, whose upper works had proved so leaky, and whose 
middle beam had been so bowed and wracked by the cross 
winds and fierce storms which they encountered during the first 
half of the voyage, that but for " a great iron screw" which one 
of the passengers had brought with him from Holland, and by 
which they were enabled to raise the beam into its place again, 
they must have turned back in despair, — conducted, after a 
four months' passage upon the ocean, either by the ignorance or 
the treachery of their pilot, to a coast widely different from that 
which they had themselves selected, and entirely out of the 
jurisdiction of the corporation from which they had obtained 
their charter; — and landing at last, — after a four weeks' search 
along the shore for a harbor in which they could land at all, — 
at one moment wearied out with wading above their knees in 
the icy surf, at another tired with travelling up and down the 
steep hills and valleys covered with snow, at a third, dashed 
upon the breakers in a foundering shallop whose sails, masts, 
rudder, had been successively carried away in a squall, with the 
spray of the sea frozen on them until their clothes looked as if 
they were glazed and felt like coats of iron, and having in all 
their search seen little else but graves, and received no other 
welcome but a shout of savages and a shower of arrows ; — 



10 THE PILGRIM FATHERS. 

landing at last, with a scanty supply of provisions for imme- 
diate use, and with ten bushels of corn for planting in the ensu- 
ing spring, which they had dug out of the sand-hills where the 
Indians had hidden it, and without which they would have been 
in danger of perishing, but for which, it is carefully recorded, 
they gave the owners entire content about six months after ; — 
landing at last, in the depth of winter, with grievous colds and 
coushs, and the seeds of those illnesses which quickly proved 
the death of many, — upon a bleak and storm-beaten rock — a 
fit emblem of most of the soil by which it was surrounded; 
this, this is a plain, unvarnished story of that day's transaction — 
this was the triumphal entry of the New England Fathers upon 
the theatre of their glory ! * What has saved it from being the 
theme of ridicule and contempt? What has rescued it from 
being handed down through all history, as a wretched effort to 
compass a mighty end by paltry and utterly inadequate means? 
What has screened it from being stigmatized forever as a Quix- 
otic sally of wild and hare-brained enthusiasts ? 

Follow this feeble, devoted band, to the spot which they have 
at length selected for their habitation. See them felling a few 
trees, sawing and carrying the timber, and building the first New 
England house, of about twenty feet square, to receive them 
and their goods; — and see that house, the earliest product of 
their exhausted energies, within a fortnight after it was finished, 
and on the very morning it was for the first time to have been 
the scene of their wilderness worship, burnt in an instant to the 
ground. 

They have chosen a Governor — one whom of all others they 
respect and love — but his care and pains were so great for the 
common good, as therewith it is thought he oppressed himself, 
and shortened his days, and one morning, early in the spring, he 
came out of the cornfields, where he had been toiling with the 
rest, sick, and died. They have elected another; but who is 
there now to be governed? They have chosen a Captain, too, 



* In tliis description, and in some other of the narrative jjortions of the x\ddress, I 
have employed ]jhrases and ))aratrraplis gleaned here and there from the writings of 
Prince, Morton, and others, withont deeming it necessary to disligurc the pages by 
too frequent a use of the inverted commas. 



THE PILGRIM FATHERS. 11 

and appointed military orders ; but who is there now to be 
armed and marched to battle? At the end of three months a 
full half of the company are dead ; — of one hundred persons 
scarce fifty remain, and of those, the living are scarce able to 
bury the dead, the well not sufficient to tend the sick. Were 
there no graves in England that they have thus come out to die 
in the wilderness ? 

But, doubtless, the diminution of their numbers has, at least, 
saved them from all fear of famine. Their little cornfields have 
yielded a tolerable crop, and the autumn finds such as have sur- 
vived in comparative health and plenty. And now, the first 
arrival of a ship from England rejoices them not a little. Once 
more they are to hear from home, from those dear families and 
friends which they have left behind them, to receive tokens of 
their remembrance in supplies sent to their relief, perhaps to be- 
hold some of them face to face coming over to share in their 
lonely exile. Alas! one of the best friends to their enterprise 
has, indeed, come over, and brought five-and-thirty persons to 
live in their plantation ; but the ship is so poorly furnished 
with provisions, that they are forced to spare her some of theirs 
to carry her back, while not her passengers only, but themselves 
too, are soon threatened with starvation. The whole company 
are forthwith put upon half allowance ; but the famine, not- 
withstanding, begins to pinch. They look hard for a supply, 
but none arrives. They spy a boat at sea ; it is nearing the 
shore ; it comes to land ; it brings — a letter ; it brings more — 
it brings seven passengers to join them; more mouths to eat 
but no food, no hope of any. But they have begged, at last, of 
a fisherman at the Eastward, as much bread as amounts to a 
quarter of a pound per day till harvest, and with that they are 
sustained and satisfied. 

And now, the Narragansetts, many thousands strong, begin 
to breathe forth threatenings and slaughter against them, mock- 
ing at their weakness and challenging them to the contest. 
And when they look for the arrival of more friends from Eng- 
land, to strengthen them in this hour of peril, they find a dis- 
orderly, unruly band of fifty or sixty worthless fellows coming 
amongst them to devour their substance, to waste and steal 



12 THE PILGRIM FATUERS. 

their corn, and by Iheir thefts and outrages upon the natives, 
also, to excite tliem to fresh and fiercer hostilities. 

Turn to the fate of their first mercantile adventure. The 
ship whicli arrived in their iiarbor next after the Mayflower had 
departed, and which, as we have seen, involved them in the 
dangers and distresses of a famine, has been laden with the pro- 
ceeds of their traflic with the Indians, and with the fruits of 
their own personal toil. The little cargo consists of two hogs- 
heads of beaver and other skins, and good clapboards as full as 
she can hold — the freight estimated in all at near five hundred 
pounds. What emotions of pride, what expectations of profit, 
went fortli with that little outfit! And how were they doomed 
to be dashed and disappointed ! Just as the ship was approach- 
ing the English coast, she was seized by a French freebooter, 
and robbed of all she had worth taking! 

A^iew them in a happier hour, in a scene of prosperity and 
success. They have a gallant warrior in their company, whose 
name, albeit it was the name of a little man, (for Miles Stan- 
dish was hardly more than five feet high,) has become the very 
synonyme of a great captain. An alarm has been given of a 
conspiracy among the natives, and he has been empowered to 
enlist as many men as he thinks sufficient to make his party 
good against all the Indians in the Massachusetts Bay. He 
has done so, has put an end to the conspiracy, and comes home 
laden with the spoils of an achievement which has been styled 
by his biographer his " most capital exploit." How long a list 
of killed and wounded, think you, is reported as the credentials 
of his bloody prowess, and how many men does he bring with 
him to share in the honors of the triumph? The whole number 
of Indians slain in this expedition was six, and though the Pil- 
grim hero brought back with him in safety every man that he 
carried out, the returning host numbered but eig'ht beside their 
leader. He did not take more with him, we arc told, in order 
to prevent that jealousy of military power which, it seems, had 
already found its way to a soil it has never since left. But his 
proceedings, notwithstanding, by no means escaped censure. 
When the pious Robinson heard of this transaction in Holland, 
he wrote to the Pilgrims « to consider the disposition of their 



THE PILGRIM FATHEKS. 13 

Captain, who was of a warm temper," adding, however, this 
beautiful sentiment in relation to the wretched race to which 
the victims of the expedition belonged, — " it would have been 
happy, if they had converted some before they had killed any." 
Inconceivable Fortune! Unimaginable Destiny! Inscruta- 
ble Providence ! Are these the details of an event from which 
such all-important, all-pervading influences were to flow ? 
Were these the means, and these the men, through which, not 
New Plymouth only was to be planted, not New England only 
to be founded, not our whole country only to be formed and 
moulded, but the whole hemisphere to be shaped, and the whole 
world shaken ? Yes, Fellow-Citizens, this was the event, these 
were the means, and these the men, by which these mighty im- 
pulses and momentous effects actually have been produced. 
And inadequate, unadapted, impotent, to such ends, as to all 
outward appearances they may seem, there was a power in them, 
and a Power over them, amply suflicient for their accomplish- 
ment, and the only powers that were thus sufficient. The direct 
and immediate influence of the passengers in -the Mayflower, 
either upon the destinies of our own land or of others, may, 
indeed, have been less conspicuous than that of some of the 
New England colonists who followed them. But it was the 
bright and shining wake they left upon the waves, it was the 
clear and brilliant beacon they lighted upon the shores, that 
caused them to have any followers. They were the pioneers in 
that peculiar path of emigration which alone conducted to these 
great results. They, as was written to them by their brethren 
in the very outset of their enterprise, — they were the instruments 
to break the ice for others, and theirs shall be the honor unto the 
world's end ! 

"When the Pilgrim Fathers landed upon Plymouth Rock, one 
hundred and twenty-eight years had elapsed since the discovery 
of the New World by Columbus. During this long period, the 
southern Continent of America had been the main scene of Eu- 
ropean adventure and enterprise. And richly had it repaid the 
exertions which had been made to subdue and settle it. The 
empires of Montezuma and the Incas had surrendered them- 
2 



14 THE PILGRIM FATHERS. 

selves at the first summons before the chivalrous energies ol 
Cortes and Pizarro, and Brazil had mingled her diamonds 
with the gold and silver of Mexico and Peru, to deck the tri- 
umphs and crown the rapacity of the Spaniard and the Portu- 
guese. 

But the northern Continent had been by no means neglected 
in the adventures of the day. Nor had those adventures been 
confined to the subjects of Portugal and Spain. The monarchs 
of those two kingdoms, indeed, emboldened by their success at 
the south, had put forth pretensions to the sole jurisdiction of 
the whole New Hemisphere. But Francis the First had well 
rei)lied, that he should be glad to see the clause in Adam's Will 
which made the northern Continent their exclusive inheritance, 
and France, under his lead, had set about securing for herself a 
share of the spoils. It was under French patronage that John 
Verazzani was sailing in 1524, when the harbor of New York 
especially attracted his notice for its great convenience and 
pleasantness. 

Bnt Fingland, also, — with better right than either of the 
others, claiming, as she could, under the Cabots, — had not been 
inattentive to the opportunity of enlarging her dominions, and 
I have already alluded to sundry unsuccessful attempts which 
were made by the English to effect this object, during the reign 
and under the patronage of Queen Elizabeth. 

Within a few months previous to the close of her reign and 
without her patronage, Bartholomew Gosnold added another to 
the list of these unavailing efforts, having only achieved for 
himself the distinction of being the first Englishman that ever 
trod what was afterwards known as the New England shore, 
and of having given to the point of that shore upon which he 
first set foot, the homely, but now endeared and honored title of 
Cape Cod. 

Only a few years after the death of the Queen, however, 
these efforts were renewed with fresh zeal. As early as 1606, 
King James divided the Virginia of Elizabeth into two parts, 
and assigned the colonization of them to two separate compa- 
nie.s, by one of which, and especially by its President, the Lord 
Chief Justice Pojjhani, an attempt was immediately made to 



THE PILGRIM FATHERS. 15 

settle the New England coast. A colony, indeed, was actually 
planted under his patronage, and under the personal lead of his 
brother, at Sagadahoc, near the mouth of the Kennebec River, 
in 1607. But it renaained there only a single year, and was 
broken up under such disheartening circumstances — the colo- 
nists, on their return, branding the country " as over cold and not 
habitable by our nation" — that the Adventurers gave up their 
designs. 

Five or six years later, notwithstanding, in 1614, the famous 
Captain John Smith, who had already, under the auspices of the 
other of the two companies, established what afterwards proved 
to be, rather than really then was, a permanent settlement in 
southern Virginia, having founded Jamestown in 1607, was 
induced to visit and survey this Northern Virginia also, as it 
was then called. And after his return home. Captain Smith pre- 
pared and published a detailed account of the country with a 
map, calling it for the first time, and as if to secure for it all the 
favor which the associations of a noble name could bestow, Neiu 
England, and giving a most glowing description of the riches, 
both of soil and sea, of forests and fisheries, which awaited the 
enjoyment of the settler. " For I am not so simple," said he, 
(fortunate, fortunate for the foundation of the country he was 
describing, such simplicity was at length discovered I) " for I am 
not so simple as to think that ever any other motive than wealth, 
will ever erect there a common weal, or draw company from 
their ease and humors at home to stay in New England." 

During the following year this gallant and chivalrous seaman 
and soldier evinced the sincerity of the opinion which he had 
thus publicly expressed, as to the inviting character of the spot, 
by attempting a settlement there himself, and made two succes- 
sive voyages for that purpose. But both of them were con- 
tinued scenes of disappointment and disaster, and he, too, for 
whose lion-hearted heroism nothing had ever seemed too diffi- 
cult, was compelled to acknowledge himself overmatched, and 
to abandon the undertaking. 

And where now were the hopes of planting New England ? 
The friends to the enterprise were at their wit's end. All that 
the patronage of princes, all that the combined energies of rich 



1Q THE PILGRIM FATHERS. 

and powerful corporations, all that the individual efforts of the 
boldest and most experienced private adventurers, stimulated by 
the most glowing imaginations of the gains which awaited their 
grasp, could do, had been done, and done in vain. Means and 
motives of this sort had effected nothing, indeed, on the whole 
North American Continent, after more than half a century of 
uninterrupted operation, but a little settlement at one extremity 
by the Spanish, (St. Augustine, in 1565,) a couple of smaller 
settlements at the other extremity by the French, (Port Royal, 
in 1(305, and Quebec, in 1609,) and smaller and more precarious 
than either, the Jamestown settlement, about midway between 
the two; this last being the only shadow— and but a shadow 
it was — of English colonization on the whole continent. 

But tiie Atlantic coast of North America, and especially that 
part of it which was to be known as New England, was des- 
tined to date its ultimate occupation to something higher and 
nobler than the chivalry of adventurers, the greediness of cor- 
porations, or the ambition of kings. The lust of new dominion, 
the thirst for treasure, the quest for spoil, had found an ample 
field, reaped an overflowing harvest, and rioted in an almost 
fatal surfeit on the southern Continent. It might almost seem, 
in view of the lofty destinies which were in store for the north- 
ern, in contemplation of the momentous influences it was to 
exert upon the welfare of mankind and the progress of the 
world, as if Providence had heaped those treasures and clustered 
those jewels upon the soil of Peru and Mexico, to divert the 
interest, absorb the passions, cloy the appetite and glut the 
rapacity which were naturally aroused by the discovery of a 
New M^orld. We might almost imagine the guardian Spirit of 
the Pilgrims commissioned to cast down this golden fruit, and 
strew this Hesperian harvest along the pathway of the newly 
awakened enter|)rise, to secure the more certainly for the sub- 
jects of its appointed care, the possession of their promised land 
— flu'ir dowerless, but chosen Atalanta. 

]int 1 am anticipating an idea which must not be thus sum- 
marily dismissed, and to which I may presently find an oppor- 
tunity to do better justice. Meantime, however, let me remark, 
that we are not left altogether to supernatural agency for at least 



THE PILGRIM FATHERS. 17 

the secondary impulse under which New England was colo- 
nized. Nor were the earthly princes and potentates of whom I 
have already spoken, — Elizabeth, her Minister of Justice, and 
her successor in the throne, — though so signally frustrated in 
all their direct endeavors to that end, without a most powerful, 
though wholly indirect and involuntary, influence upon its final 
accomplishment. 

The daughter of Ann Bullen could not fail to cherish a most 
hearty and implacable hatred towards that Church, in defiance 
of whose thunders she was conceived and cradled, and in the 
eye and open declaration of which she was a bastard, a heretic, 
an outlaw, and a usurper. So far, at any rate, Elizabeth was 
a friend to the Reformation. But she had almost as little notion 
as her father, of any reformation which reached beyond releas- 
ing her dominions from the authority of the Pope, and esta- 
blishing herself at the head of the Church. And, accordingly, 
the very first year of her reign was marked by the enactment of 
laws exacting, under the severest penalties, conformity to the 
doctrines and discipline of the English Church — a policy which 
she never relinquished. 

For a violation of these laws and others of subsequent enact- 
ment, but of similar import, a large number of persons in her 
kingdom, whose minds had been too thoroughly inspired with 
disgust for the masks and mummeries of Catholic worship, to 
be content with a bare renunciation of the temporal or spiritual 
authority of the Pope, were arrested, imprisoned, and treated 
with all manner of persecution. At least six of them were 
capitally executed, and two of these, as it happened, were con- 
demned to death by that very Lord Chief Justice whom we 
have seen a few years afterwards at the head of the Plymouth 
Company, engaged in so earnest but unavailing an effort to colo- 
nize the New England coast. Little did he know that his part 
in that work had been already performed. 

In an imaginary '• dialogue between some young men born in 
New England, and sundry ancient men that came out of Hol- 
land and Old England," written in 1648, by Governor Bradford 
— a name which before all others should be this day remembered 
with veneration — the young men are represented as asking of 

2* 



18 THE PILGllIJI FATUERS. 

the old men, bow many Separatists had been executed ? " We 
know certainly of six," replied the ancient men, '-that were pub- 
licly executed, besides such as died in prisons. . . . Two of 
thcin were condemned by crnel Judge Popham, whose counte- 
nance and carriage was very rough and severe towards them, 
with many sharp menaces. But God gave them courage to 
bear it, and to make this answer: — 

" ' My Lord, your face wc fear not, 
And for your threats we care not. 
And to come to your read service we dare not.' " 

Nor did King James depart from the footsteps of his prede- 
cessor in the religious policy of his administration. Though 
from his Scotch education and connections, and from the opi- 
nions which he had openly avowed before coming to the Eng- 
lish throne, he had seemed pledged to a career of liberality and 
toleration, yet no sooner was he fairly seated on that throne than 
he, too, set about vindicating his claim to his new title of " De- 
fender of the Faith," and enforcing conformity to the rites and 
ceremonies of the English Church. And he cut short a confer- 
ence at Hampton Court, between himself and the Pm-itan lead- 
ers, got up at his own instigation, in the vainglorious idea that 
he could vanquish these heretics in an argument, with this sum- 
mary and most significant declaration — " If this be all they 
have to say, I will make them conform, or I ivill harry them out 
of the landP 

The idea of banishment was full of bitterness to those to 
whom it was thus sternly held up. They loved their native 
land with an affection which no rigor of restraint, no cruelty of 
persecution could quench. Death itself, to some of them at 
least, seemed to have fewer fears than exile. " We crave," was 
the touching language of a Petition of sixty Separatists, in 
l-OO'^, who had been committed unbailable to close prison in 
Ijondon, where they were allowed neither meat, nor drink, nor 
lodging, and where no one was suft'ered to have access to them, 
so as no felons or traitors or murderers were thus dealt with, — 
" We crave for all of us but the liberty either to die openly or 
to live openly in the land of our nativity. If we deserve death, 



THE PILGRIM FATHERS. 19 

it beseemeth the majesty of justice not to see us closely mur- 
dered, yea, starved to death with hunger and cold, and stifled in 
loathsome dungeons. If we be guiltless, we crave but the bene- 
fit of our innocence, that we may have peace to serve our God 
and our Prince in the place of the sepulchres of our fathers." 

But there were those among them, notwithstanding, to whom 
menaces, whether of banishment or of the block, even uttered 
thus angrily by one, who, as he once well said of himself, " while 
he held the appointment of Judges and Bishops in his hand, 
could make what law and what gospel he chose," were alike 
powerless, to prevail on them to conform to modes and creeds 
which they did not of themselves approve. They heard a voice 
higher and mightier than James's, calling to them in the accents 
of their own consciences, and saying, in the express language 
of a volume, which it had been the most precious result of all 
the discoveries, inventions, and improvements of that age of 
wonders to unlock to them — " Be ye not conformed, but be ye 
transformed" — and that voice, summon it to exile, or summon 
it to the grave, they were resolved to obey. 

Foiled, therefore, utterly in the first of his alternatives, the 
King resorted to the last. It was more within the compass of 
his power, and he did harry them out of the land. Within three 
years after the utterance of this threat, (namely, in 1607,) it is 
recorded by the Chronologist, that Messrs. Clifton's and Robin- 
son's church in the north of England, being extremely harassed, 
some cast into prison, some beset in their houses, some forced 
to leave their farms and families, begin to fly over to Holland 
for purity of worship and liberty of conscience. 

Religions, true and false, have had their Hegiras, and institu- 
tions and empires have owed their origin to the flight of a child, 
a man, or a multitude. Moses fled from the face of Pharaoh ; 
but he returned to overwhelm him with the judgments of Jeho- 
vah, and to build up Israel into a mighty people. Mahomet 
with his followers fled from the magistrates of Mecca ; but he 
came back, with the sword in one hand and the Koran in the 
other, and the empire of the Saracens was soon second to none 
on the globe. " The young child and his mother" fled from the 
fury of Herod ; but they returned, and the banner of the Cross 



20 THE PILGRIM FATHERS. 

was still destined to go forth conquering and to conquer. The 
Pilgrim Fathers, also, fled from the oppression of this arbitrary 
tyrant, and, although their return was to a widely distant por- 
tion of his dominions, yet return they did, and the freedom and 
independence of a great republic, delivered from the yoke of that 
tyrant's successors, date back their origin, this day, to the princi- 
ples for which they were proscribed, and to the institutions 
which they jilanted. 

liui let us follow them in their eventful flight. They first set- 
tle at Amsterdam, where they remain for about a year, and are 
soon joined by the rest of their brethren. But finding that 
some contentions had arisen in a church which was there before 
them, and fearing that they might themselves become embroiled 
in them, though they knew it would be very much " to the pre- 
judice of their outward interest" to remove, yet "valuing peace 
and spiritual comfort above all other riches " they depart to 
Leyden, and there live "in great love and harmony both among 
themselves and their neighbor citizens for above eleven years." 

But, although during all this time they had been courteously 
entertained and lovingly respected by the people, and had quietly 
and sweetly enjoyed their church liberties under the States, yet 
finding that, owing to the difference of their language, they 
could exert but little influence over the Dutch, and had not yet 
succeeded in bringing them to reform the neglect of observa- 
tion of the Lord's day as a Sabbath, or any other thing amiss 
among them, — that owing, also, to the licentiousness of youth 
in that country and the manifold temptations of the place, their 
children were drawn away by evil examples into extravagant 
and dangerous courses, they now begin to fear that Holland 
would be no place for their church and their posterity to con- 
tinue in comfortably, and on those accounts to think of a re- 
move to America. And having hesitated a while between 
Guiana and Virginia, as a place of resort, and having at last 
resolved on the latter, they send their agents to treat with the 
Virginia Company for a riglit within their chartered limits, and 
to sec if the King would give them liberty of conscience there. 
'I'lic Company they found ready enough to grant them a patent 
with ample privileges, but liberty of conscience under the broad 



THE PILGRIM FATHERS. 21 

seal King James could never be brought to bestow, and the 
most that could be extorted from him, by the most persevering 
importunity, was a promise that he would connive at them, and 
not molest them, provided they should carry themselves peace- 
ably. 

Notwithstanding this discouragement, however, they resolved 
to venture. And after another year of weary negotiation with 
the merchants who were to provide them with a passage, the 
day for their departure arrives. It had been agreed that a part 
of the church should go before their brethren to America to pre- 
pare for the rest, and as the major part was to stay behind, it 
was also determined that their pastor, the beloved Robinson, 
should stay with them. Not only were the Pilgrims thus about 
to leave " that goodly and pleasant city which had been their 
resting place above eleven years," but to leave behind them also 
the greatest part of those with whom they had been so long and 
lovingly associated in a strange land, and this — to encounter 
all the real and all the imaginary terrors which belonged to that 
infancy of ocean navigation, to cross a sea of three thousand 
miles in breadth, and to reach at last a shore which had hith- 
erto repelled the approaches of every civilized settler ! Who 
can describe the agonies of such a scene ? Their Memorialist 
has done it in language as satisfactory as any language can be, 
but the description still seems cold and feeble. 

" And now the time being come when they were to depart," 
says he, " they were accompanied with most of their brethren 
out of the city unto a town called Delft Haven, where the ship 
lay ready to receive them. . . . One night was spent with 
little sleep with the most, but with friendly entertainment and 
Christian discourse, and other real expressions of true Christian 
love. The next day, the wind being fair, they went on board, 
and their friends with them, where truly doleful was the sight 
of that sad and mournful parting, to hear what sighs and sobs 
and prayers did sound amongst them, what tears did gush from 
every eye, and pithy speeches pierced each other's hearts, that 
sundry of the Dutch strangers, that stood on the Key as specta- 
tors, could not refrain from tears. But the tide (which stays 
for no man) calling them away that were thus loath to depart. 



22 THE PILGRIM FATHERS. 

their reverend pastor falling down on his knees, and they all 
with him, with watery cheeks commended them with most fer- 
vent prayers unto the Lord and his blessing; and then, with 
mutual embraces and many tears, they took their leave of one 
another, which proved to be the last leave to many of them." 

Such was the embarkation of the New England Fathers I 
Such the commencement of that Pilgrim voyage, whose pro- 
gress during a period of five months I have already described, 
and whose termination we this day commemorate! Under 
these auspices, and by these instruments, was at last completed 
an undertaking which had so long baffled the efTorts of states- 
men and heroes, of corporations and of kings! Said I not 
rightly that the Pilgrims had a power within them, and a Power 
over them, which were not only amply adequate to its accom- 
plishment, but which were the only powers that were thus ade- 
quate ? And who requires to be reminded what those powers 
were ? 

I fear not to be charged wnth New England bigotry or Puri- 
tan fanaticism in alluding to the Power which was over the Pil- 
grims in their humble but heroic enterprise. If Washington, in 
reviewing the events of our Revolutionary history, could say to 
the American armies, as he quitted their commajid, that '• the 
singular interpositions of Providence in our feeble condition 
were such as could scarcely escape the attention of the most un- 
observing," and again to the American Congress, on first assum- 
ing the administration of the Union, that " every step by which 
the people of the United States had advanced to the character 
of an independent nation, seemed to have been distinguished 
by some token of Providential agency," how much less can any 
one be in danger of subjecting himself to the imputation of 
indulging in a wild conceit, or yielding to a weak superstition, 
by acknowledging, by asserting, a Divine intervention in the 
liistory of New England colonization. It were easy, it is true, 
to convey the same sentiment in more fashionable phraseology 
— to disguise an allusion to a wonder-working Providence un- 
der the name of an extraordinary fortune, or to cloak the idea 
of a l)i\in(' appointment under the title of a lucky accident. 
But I should feel that I dishonored the memory of our New 



THE PILGRIM FATHERS. 23 

England sires, and deserved the rebuke of their assembled sons, 
were I, on an occasion like the present, to resort to such misera- 
ble paltering. 

No — I see something more than mere fortunate accidents or 
extraordinary coincidences in the whole discovery and coloniza- 
tion of our country, — in the age at which these events took 
place, in the people by whom they were effected, and more es- 
pecially in the circumstances by which they were attended ; and 
may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth if ever I am 
ashamed to say sol 

When I reflect that this entire hemisphere of ours remained 
so long in a condition of primeval barbarism, — that the very 
existence of its vast continents was so long concealed from the 
knowledge of civilized man, — that these colossal mountains so 
long lifted their summits to the sky and cast their shadows 
across the earth, — that these gigantic rivers so long poured their 
mighty, matchless waters to the sea, — that these magnificent 
forests so long waved their unrivalled foliage to the winds, and 
these luxuriant fields and prairies so long spread out their virgin 
sods before the sun, — without a single intelligent human being 
to enjoy, to admire, or even to behold them : — 

When I reflect to what heights of civilization, ambition, and 
power, so many of the nations of the Old World were succes- 
sively advanced, reaching a perfection in some branches of art 
and of science which has destined their very ruins to be the 
wonder, the delight, the study, and the models of mankind for 
ever, and pushing their commerce and their conquests over sea 
and shore with an energy so seemingly indomitable and illimit- 
able, and yet that these seas and these shores, reserved for other 
Argonauts than those of Greece, and other Eagles than those 
of Rome, were protected alike from the reach of their arts and of 
their arms, from their rage for glory and their lust for spoils : — 

When I reflect that all the varieties of roaming tribes which, 
up to the period of the events of which I speak, had found their 
way, nobody knows when or from whence, to this northern Con- 
tinent at least, were so mysteriously endowed with a nature, 
not merely to make no progress in improvement and settlement 
of themselves, but even to resist and defy every influence which 



2-4 THE PILGRIM FATHERS. 

could be brought to bear upon them by others, except such as 
tended to their own extirpation and overthrow, — how they 
shrank- at the approach of the civilized settler, melting away as 
they retired, and marking the trail of their retreat, I had almost 
said, by the scent of their own graves; — or, if some stragglers 
of a race less barbarous, at some uncertain epoch, were brought 
unknowingly upon our shores, that, instead of stamping the 
Rock upon which they landed with the unequivocal foot-prints 
of the fathers of a mighty nation, they only scratched upon its 
surface a few illegible characters, to puzzle the future antiquary 
to decide whether they were of Scandinavian or of Carthagi- 
nian, of Runic or of Punic origin, and to prove only this dis- 
tinctly, — that their authors were not destined to be the settlers, 
or even the discoverers, in any true sense of that term, of the 
country upon which they had thus prematurely stumbled : — * 

When I reflect upon the momentous changes in the institu- 
tions of society, and in the instruments of human power, which 
were crowded within the period which was ultimately signalized 
by this discovery and this settlement ; the press, by its magic 
enginery, breaking down every barrier, and annihilating every 
monopoly in the paths of knowledge, and proclaiming all men 
equal in the arts of peace ; gunjwivder, by its tremendous pro- 
perties, undermining the moated castles and rending asunder the 
plaited mail of the lordly chieftains, and making all men equal 
on the field of battle ; the Bible, rescued from its unknown 
tongues, its unauthorized interpretations, and its unworthy per- 
versions, opened at length in its original simplicity and purity to 
the world, and proving that all men were born equal in the eye of 
God ; — when I see learning reviving from its lethargy of centu- 
ries, religion reasserting its native majesty, and liberty — Liberty 
itself — thus armed and thus attended, starting up anew to its 
long suspended career, and exclaiming, as it were, in the confi- 
dence of its new instruments and its new auxiliaries — " Give 

* Von Mdllcr, in his Universal History, speaks of "the monument apparently 
jPun/o, wliicli was fou)id some years a<,'o in tlic forests behind Boston," and adds, '• it 
is possihlc tliat some Tyrians or Carthajrinians, thrown by storms upon unknown 
coasts, uncertain if ever tiic same tracts mi;j;ht be aijain discovered, chose to leave this 
nionnmcnt of their adventures." He refers, witliout doubt, to the same Eock at Digh- 
ton, whicli ilic Society of Northern Antiquaries in Denmark claim as conclusive evi- 
dcucc of the discovery of America by the Scandinavians. 



THE PILGRIM FATHERS. 25 

me now a place to stand upon — a place free from the inter- 
ference of established power, free from the embarrassment of 
ancient abuses, free from the paralyzing influence of a jealous 
and overbearing prerogative — g-ive me hut a place to stand upon, 
and I will move the ivorUi;' — I cannot consider it, I cannot call 
it, a mere fortunate coincidence, that then, at that very instant, 
the veil of waters was lifted up, that place revealed, and the 
world moved! 

When I reflect, too, on the nation under whose reluctant 
auspices this revelation was finally vouchsafed to the longing 
vision of the intrepid Admiral ; how deeply it was already 
plunged in the grossest superstitions and sensualities ; how 
darkly it was already shadowed by the impending horrors of its 
dread tribunal, and how soon it was to lose the transient lustre 
which might be reflected upon it from the virtues of an Isabella 
or the genius of a Charles V,, and to sink into a long and ray- 
less night of ignorance and oppression : — 

When I look back upon its sister kingdom of the Peninsula, 
also, which shared with it in reaping the teeming first-fruits of 
the new-found world, and find them matching each other not 
more nearly in the boldness of their maritime enterprise, than 
in the sternness of their religious bigotry and in the degrada- 
tion of their approaching doom : — 

When I remember how both of these kingdoms, from any 
colonies of whose planting there could have been so poor a 
hope of any early or permanent advancement to the cause of 
human freedom, were attracted and absorbed by the mineral 
and vegetable treasures of the tropical islands and territories, 
and by the gorgeous empires which spirits of congenial gross- 
ness and sensuality had already established there, while this 
precise portion of America, these noble harbors, these glorious 
hills, these exhaustless valleys and matchless lakes, presenting a 
combination of climate and of soil, of land course and water 
course, marked and quoted, as it were, by nature herself, for the 
abode of a great, united, and prosperous republic, — the rock- 
bound region of New England not excepted from the category, 
which, though it can boast of nothing nearer akin to gold or 
diamonds than the sparkling mica of its granite or the glittering 

3 



0(5 THE PILGRIM FATHERS. 

crystals of its ice, was yet framed to produce a wealth richer than 
gold, and whose price is above rubies, — the intelligent and vir- 
tuous industry of a free people; — when I remember, I say, 
how this exact portion of the new world was held back for 
more than a century after its discovery, and reserved for the 
occupation and settlement of the only nation under the sun 
able to furnish the founders of such a republic and the pro- 
genitors of such a people — the very nation in which the re- 
forms and inventions of the day had wrought incomparably the 
most important results, and human improvement and human 
liberty had made incalculably the largest advance, — I cannot 
ref^ard it, I cannot speak of it, as a mere lucky accident, that 
this Atlantic seaboard was settled by colonies of the Anglo- 
Saxon race ! 

And when, lastly, I reflect on the circumstances under which 
this settlement was in the end effected, on that part of the coast, 
more especially, which exerted a paramount influence on the 
early destinies of the Continent, and gave the first unequivocal 
assurance that virtue and industry and freedom were here to 
find a refuge and here to found themselves an empire: — 

When I behold a feeble company of exiles, quitting the 
strange land to which persecution had forced them to flee ; enter- 
ing with so many sighs and sobs and partings and prayers on a 
voyage so full of perils at the best, but rendered a hundred-fold 
more perilous by the unusual severities of the season and the 
absolute unseaworthiness of their ship ; arriving in the depth of 
winter on a coast to which even their pilot was a perfect 
stranger, and where "they had no friends to welcome them, no 
inns to entertain them, no houses, much less towns, to repair unto 
for succor," but where, — instead of friends, shelter, or refresh- 
ment, — famine, exposure, the wolf, the savage, disease, and death, 
seemed waiting for them ; and yet accomplishing an end which 
royalty and patronage, the love of dominion and of gold, indi- 
vidual adventure and corporate enterprise had so long essayed 
in vain, and founding a colony which was to defy alike the 
machinations and the menaces of tyranny, in all periods of its 
history, — it needs not, it needs not, that I should find the coral 
pathway of the sea laid bare, and its waves a wall on the 



THE PILGRIM FATHERS. 27 

right hand and on the left, and the crazed chariot wheels of the 
oppressor floating in fragments upon its closing floods, to feel, 
to realize, that higher than human was the Power which pre- 
sided over the Exodus of the Pilgrim Fathers ! 

Was it not something more than the ignorance or the self- 
will of an earthly and visible pilot, which, instead of conducting 
them to the spot which they had deliberately selected, — the 
very spot on which we are now assembled, the banks of your 
own beautiful Hudson, of w^iich they had heard so much dur- 
ing their sojourn in Holland, but which were then swarming with 
a host of horrible savages, — guided them to a coast which, 
though bleaker and far less hospitable in its outward aspect, 
had yet, by an extraordinary epidemic, but a short time previous, 
been almost completely cleared of its barbarous tenants ? Was 
it not something more, also, than mere mortal error or human 
mistake, which, instead of bringing them within the limits pre- 
scribed in the patent they had procured in England, directed 
them to a shore on which they were to land upon their own 
responsibility and under their own authority, and thus com- 
pelled them to an act, which has rendered Cape Cod more me- 
morable than Runnymede, and the cabin of the Mayflower than 
the proudest hall of ancient charter or modern constitution, — 
the execution of the first written original contract of Democratic 
Self-Government which is found in the annals of the world ? 

But the Pilgrims, I have said, had a power within them also. 
If God was not seen among them in the fire of a Horeb, in the 
earthquake of a Sinai, or in the wind cleaving asunder the waves 
of the sea they were to cross. He was with them, at least, in the 
still, small voice. Conscience, conscience, was the nearest to 
an earthly power which the Pilgrims possessed, and the freedom 
of conscience the nearest to an earthly motive which prompted 
their career. It was conscience which " weaned them from the 
delicate milk of their mother country, and inured them to the 
difficulties of a strange land." It was conscience which made 
them "not as other men, whom small things could discourage, 
or small discontentments cause to wish themselves at home 
again." It was conscience — that " robur et ces triplex circa 
pectus " — which emboldened them to launch their fragile bark 



28 THE PILGRIM FAXnERS. 

upon a merciless ocean, fearless of the fighting winds and low- 
ering' storms. It was conscience which stiffened them to brave 
the "perils, endure the hardships, undergo the privations of a 
howling, houseless, hopeless desolation. And thus, almost in 
the very age when the Great Master of human nature was put- 
ting into the mouth of one of his most interesting and philo- 
sojiiiical characters, that well-remembered conclusion of a cele- 
brated soliloquy, — 

" Thus conscience does make cowards of us all ; 
And thus the native hue of resolution 
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought ; 
And enterprises of great pith and moment 
With this regard, their currents turn awry, 
And lose the name of action," — 

this very conscience, a clog and an obstacle, indeed, to its foes, 
but the surest strength and sharpest spur of its friends, was 
inspiring a courage, confirming a resolution, and accomplishing 
an enterprise, to which the records of the world will be searched 
in vain to find a parallel. Let it never be forgotten that it was 
conscience, and that, not intrenched behind broad seals, but en- 
shrined in brave souls, which carried through and completed the 
long-batiled undertaking of settling the New England coast. 

But conscience did more than this. It was that same still, 
small voice, which, under God, and through the instrumentality 
of the Pilgrims, pronounced the very fiat of light in the crea- 
tion of civilized society on this whole northern Continent of 
America; exerting an influence in the process of that creation, 
compared with which all previous influences were but so many 
movings on the face of the waters. 

Let me not be thought, in this allusion and others like it, in 
which I have already indulged, to slight the claitii^'of the Vir- 
ginia colony, or to do designed injustice to its ori^^nal settlers. 
There are laurels enough growing wild upon the graves of Ply- 
mouth, without tearing a leaf from those of Jamestown. New 
England docs not rcHiuirt* to have other parts of the country 
cast into siiade, in order that the brightness of her own early 
days may be seen and admired. Least of all, would any son 
of New England be found uttering a word in wanton disparage- 



THE PILGRIM FATHERS. 29 

ment of " our noble, patriotic, sister colony, Virginia," as she 
was once justly termed by the patriots of Faneuil Hall. There 
are circumstances of peculiar and beautiful correspondence in 
the careers of Virginia and New England, which must ever 
constitute a bond of sympathy, affection, and pride between 
their children. Not only did they form respectively the great 
northern and southern rallying-points of civilization on this con- 
tinent; not only was the most friendly competition, or the most 
cordial cooperation, as circumstances allowed, kept up between 
them during their early colonial existence ; but who forgets the 
generous emulation, the noble rivalry, with which they contin- 
ually challenged and seconded each other in resisting the first 
beginnings of British aggression, in the persons of their James 
Otises and Patrick Henrys ? Who forgets that, while that resist- 
ance was first brought to a practical test in New England, 
at Lexington, and Concord, and Bunker Hill, — fortune, as if 
resolved to restore the balance of renown between the two, 
reserved for the Yorktown of Virginia the last crowning victory of 
Independence ? Who forgets that, while the hand by which the 
original Declaration of that Independence was drafted, was fur- 
nished by Virginia, the tongue by which the adoption of that 
instrument was defended and secured, was supplied by New 
England — a bond of common glory, upon which not death alone 
seemed to set his seal, but Deity, I had almost said, to affix 
an immortal sanction, when the spirits by which that hand and 
that tongue were moved, were caught up together to the clouds 
on the same great day of the nation's jubilee. Nor let me omit 
to allude to a peculiar distinction which belongs to Virginia 
alone. It is her preeminent honor and pride, that the name 
which the whole country acknowledges as that of a father, she can 
claim as that of a son — a name at which comparison ceases — 
to which there is nothing similar, nothing second — a name 
combining in its associations all that was most pure and godly 
in the nature of the Pilgrims, with all that was most brave and 
manly in the character of the Patriots — a name above every 
name in the annals of human liberty I 

But I cannot refrain from adding, that not more does the 
fame of Washington surpass that of every other public charac- 

3* 



30 THE PILGRIM FATHERS. 

ter which America, or the world at large, has yet produced, than 
the Now England colony, in its origin and its influences, its 
objects and its results, excels that from which Washington was 
destined to proceed. 

In one point, indeed, and that, it is true, a point of no incon- 
siderable moment, the colonies of Jamestown and Plymouth 
were alike. Both were colonies of Englishmen; — and in run- 
ning down the history of our country from its first colonization 
to the present hour, I need hardly say that no single circum- 
stance can be found, which has exercised a more propitious and 
elevating influence upon its fortunes, than the English origin of 
its settlers. Not to take up time in discussing either the ab- 
stract adaptation of the Anglo-Saxon character to the circum- 
stances of a new countiy, or its relative capacity for the esta- 
blishment and enjoyment of free institutions, — the most cursory 
glance at the comparative condition, past or present, of those 
portions of the New World, which were planted by other na- 
tions, is amply sufficient to illustrate this idea. Indeed, our 
own continent affords an illustration of it, im.pressed upon us 
anew by recent events in the Canadian colonies, which renders 
any reference to the other entirely superflaous. The contrast 
between the social, moral, and intellectual state of the two parts 
of North America which were peopled respectively by English- 
men and Frenchmen, has been often alluded to. But a com- 
parison of their political conditions exhibits differences still 
more striking. 

Go back to the period immediately preceding the Stamp Act, 
and survey the circumstances of the two portions of country, as 
they then existed. Both arc in a state of colonial dependence 
on C4reat Britain. But the one has just been reduced to that 
state by force of arms. Its fields and villages have just been 
the scenes of the pillage and plunder which always march in 
the train of conquest. The allegiance of their owners has been 
violently transferred to new masters, as the penalty of defeat. 
And to keep alive the more certainly the vindictive feelings 
wliieli belong to the bosoms of a vanquished people, and to 
frustrate the more entirely the natural influences of time and 
custom in healing up the wounds which such a subjugation has 



THE PILGRIM FATHERS. 31 

inflicted, the laws of their conquerors are enacted and adminis- 
tered in a strange tongue, and one which continually reminds 
them that the yoke under which they have passed, is that of a 
nation towards which they have an hereditary hatred. The 
people of the other portion, on the contrary, owe their relation 
to the common sovereign of them both, to nothing but their 
own natural and voluntary choice, — feel towards the nation 
over which he presides nothing but the attachment and venera- 
tion of children towards the parent of their pride, and are bound 
to it by the powerful ties of a common history, a common lan- 
guage, and a common blood. Tell me, now, which of the two 
will soonest grow impatient of its colonial restraint, soonest 
throw off its foreign subordination, and soonest assert itself free 
and independent? 

And what other solution can any one suggest to the problem 
presented by the fact as it exists — the very reverse of that 
which would thus have been predicted, — what other clew can 
any one offer to the mystery, that the French colonies should 
have remained, not entirely quietly, indeed, but with only occa- 
sional returns of ineffectual throes and spasms, up to this very 
hour, in a political condition which every thing would seem to 
have conspired to render loathsome and abhorrent, while the 
English colonies, snapping alike every link either of love or of 
power, breaking every bond both of affection and authority, 
resolved themselves into an independent nation half a century 
ago, — what other explanation, I repeat, can any one give to 
this paradox fulfilled, than that which springs from a considera- 
tion of the comparative capacities for self-improvement and 
self-government of the races by which they were planted ? A 
common history, a common language, a common blood, were, 
indeed, links of no ordinary strength, between the Atlantic colo- 
nies and the mother country. But that language was the lan- 
guage in which Milton had sung, Pym pleaded, and Locke rea- 
soned ; that blood was the blood which Hampden had poured 
out on the plain of Chalgrove, and in which Sidney and Rus- 
sell had weltered on the block of martyrdom ; and that history 
had been the history of toiling, struggling, but still-advancing 
liberty for a thousand years. Such links could only unite the 



32 THE PILGRIM FATHERS. 

free. They lost their tenacity in a moment, when attempted to 
be recast on the forge of despotism and employed in the service 
of oppression. Nay, the brittle fragments into which they were 
broken in such a process, were soon moulded and tempered and 
sharpened into the very blades of a triumphant resistance. 
What more effective instruments, what more powerful incite- 
ments, did our fathers enjoy, in their revolutionary struggle, than 
the lessons afforded them in the language, the examples held up 
to them in the history, the principles, opinions, sensibilities, im- 
pulses, flowing from the hearts and vibrating through the veins, 
which they inherited from the very nation against which they 
were contending ! Yes, let us not omit, even on this day, when 
we commemorate the foundation of a colony which dates back 
its orifrin to British bigotry and British persecution, even in this 
connection, too, when we are speaking of that contest for liberty 
which owed its commencement to British oppression and Bri- 
tish despotism, — let us not omit to express our gratitude to 
God, that old England was still our mother country, and to ac- 
knowledge our obligations to our British ancestors for the glo- 
rious capabilities and instincts which they bequeathed us. 

But, with the single exception that both emigrated from Eng- 
land, the colonies of Jamestown and Plymouth had nothing in 
common, and, to all outward appearances, the former enjoyed 
every advantage. The two companies, as it happened, though 
so long an interval elapsed between their reaching America, left 
their native land within about a year of each other ; but under 
what widely dilTerent circumstances did they embark! The 
former set sail from the port of the Metropolis, in a squadron of 
three vessels, under an experienced commander, under the pa- 
tronage of a wealthy and powerful corporation, and with an 
ample patent from the Crown. The latter betook themselves to 
their solitary bark, by stealth, under cover of the night, and 
from a bleak and desert heath in Lincolnshire, while a band of 
armed horsemen, rushing down upon them before the embarka- 
tion was completed, made prisoners of all who were not already 
on board, and condemned husbands and wives, and parents and 
children, to a cruel and almost hopeless separation. 

Nor did their respective arrivals on the American shores, 



THE PILGRIM FATHERS. 33 

though divided by a period of thirteen years, present a less sig- 
nal contrast. The Virginia colony entered the harbor of James- 
town about the middle of May, and never could that lovely 
Queen of Spring have seemed lovelier, than when she put on her 
flowery kirtle and her wreath of clusters, to welcome those ad- 
miring strangers to the enjoyment of her luxuriant vegetation. 
But there were no May-flowers for the Pilgrims, save the name 
written, as in mockery, on the stern of their treacherous ship. 
They entered the harbor of Plymouth on the shortest day in the 
year, in this last quarter of December, — and when could the 
rigid Winter-King have looked more repulsive than when, 
shrouded with snow and crowned with ice, he admitted those 
shivering wanderers within the realms of his dreary domination? 

But mark the sequel. From a soil teeming with every variety 
of production for food, for fragrance, for beauty, for profit, the 
Jamestown colonists reaped only disappointment, discord, wretch- 
edness. Having failed in the great object of their adventure — 
the discovery of gold — they soon grew weary of their condi- 
tion, and within three years after their arrival are found on the 
point of abandoning the country. Indeed, they are actually 
embarked, one and all, with this intent, and are already at the 
mouth of the River, when, falling in with new hands and fresh 
supplies which have been sent to their relief, they are induced 
to return once more to their deserted village. 

But even up to the very year in which the Pilgrims landed, 
ten years after this renewal of their designs, they " had hardly 
become settled in their minds," had hardly abandoned the pur- 
pose of ultimately returning to England ; and their condition 
may be illustrated by the fact, that in 1619, and again in 1621, 
cargoes of young women, (a commodity of which there was 
scarcely a sample in the whole plantation — and would to Plea- 
ven, that all the traffic in human flesh on the Virginian coast, 
even at this early period, had been as innocent in itself and as 
beneficial in its results!) were sent out by the corporation in 
London and sold to the planters for wives, at from one hundred 
and twenty to one hundred and fifty pounds of tobacco apiece I 

Nor was the political condition of the Jamestown colony 
much in advance of its social state. The charter, under which 



34 THE PILGRIM FATHERS. 

they came out, contained not a single element of popular liberty, 
and secured not a single right or franchise to those who lived 
under it. And, though a gleam of freedom seemed to dawn 
upon them in 1619, when they instituted a Colonial Assembly 
and inlrodneed the representative system for the first time into 
the New World, the ])recarious character of their popular insti- 
tutions and the slender foundation of their popular liberties at 
a much later period, even as far down as 1671, may be under- 
stood from that extraordinary declaration of Sir William Berke- 
ley, then Governor of Virginia, to the Lords Commissioners: — 
"i thank God, there are no free schools nor printing — and I 
hope we shall not have these hundred years ; — for learning has 
brought disobedience, and heresy, and sects into the world; and 
printing has divulged them, and libels against the best govern- 
ment. God keep us from both." 

But how was it with the Pilgrims ? From a soil of com- 
parative barrenness, they gathered a rich harvest of content- 
ment, harmony, and happiness. Coming to it for no purpose of 
commerce or adventure, they found all that they sought — reli- 
gious freedom ; and that made the wilderness to them like 
Eden, and the desert as the garden of the Lord. Of quitting 
it, from the very hour of their arrival, they seem never once to 
have entertained, or even conceived, a thought. The first foot 
that leapt gently but fearlessly on Plymouth Rock was a pledge 
that there would be no retreating, — tradition tells us that it was 
the foot of Mary Chilton.* They have brought their wives 
and their little ones with them, and what other assurance could 
they give that they have come to their home? And accord- 
ingly they proceed at once to invest it with all the attributes of 
home, and to make it a free and a happy home. The compact 
of their own adoption under which they landed, remained the 
sole guide of their government for nine years, and though it 

* The distinction of hcing the first person that set foot on Plymouth Eock has 
been claimed for others hcsidc Mary Chilton, and particularly for ^folm Alden. But I 
could not resist the remark of Judge Davis on this ])oint, in one of his notes to Mor- 
ton's -Moniorial. After cpiotinfr tlic languaszc of another, that " for the pur]ioscs of the 
arts a female lij^urc, typical of faith, hope, and charitv, is well adapted," — he observes 
that. ■■ as there is a ;rrcat dcfrree of uucertiiinty on this subject, it is not only grateful, 
l)ut allowable, to indulj^e the imagination, and we may expect from the friends of John 
Alden, that they should give place to the lady." 



THE PILGllIM FATHERS. 35 

was then superseded by a charter from the Corporation within 
whose limits they had fallen, it was a charter of a liberal and 
comprehensive character, and under its provisions they conti- 
nued to lay broad and deep the foundations of civil freedom. 
The trial by jury was established by the Pilgrims within three 
years after their arrival, and constitutes the appropriate opening 
to the first chapter of their legislation. The education of their 
children, as we have seen, was one of their main motives for 
leaving Holland, and there is abundant evidence that it was 
among the earliest subjects of their attention ; while the plant- 
ers of Massachusetts, who need not be distinguished from the 
planters of Plymouth for any purposes of this comparison, 
founded the college at Cambridge in 1636 ; set up a printing 
press at the same place in 1639, which " divulged," in its first 
workings at least, nothing more libellous or heretical than a 
Psalm book and an Almanac; and as early as 1647 had insti- 
tuted, by an ever-memorable statute, that noble system of New 
England free schools, which constitutes at this moment the best 
security of liberty, wherever liberty exists, and its best hope, 
wherever it is still to be established. 

It would carry me far beyond the allowable limits of this 
Address, if, indeed, I have not already exceeded them, to con- 
trast, in detail, the respective influences upon our country, and, 
through it, upon the world, of these two original colonies. The 
elements for such a contrast I have already suggested, and I 
shall content myself with only adding further upon this point, 
the recent and very remarkable testimony of two most intelli- 
gent French travellers, whose writings upon the United States 
have justly received such distinguished notice on both sides the 
Atlantic. 

" I have already observed," says De Tocqueville, that " the 
origin of the American settlements may be looked upon as the 
first and most efficacious cause, to which the present prosperity 
of the United States may be attributed. . . . When I 
reflect upon the consequences of this primary circumstance, 
methinks, I see the destiny of America embodied in the first 
Puritan who landed on these shores, just as the human race 
was represented by the first man." 



36 THE PILGRIM FATHERS. 

" If we wished," says Chevalier, " to form a single type, repre- 
senting the American character of the present moment as a sin- 
gle whole, it would be necessary to take at least three fom-ths of 
the Yankee race and to mix it with hardly one fourth of the 
Virginian." 

But the Virginia type was not complete when it first appeared 
on the coast of Jamestown, and I must not omit, before bring- 
ing these remarks to a conclusion, to allude to one other element 
of any just comparison between the two colonies. The year 
1620 was unquestionably the great epoch of American destinies. 
Within its latter half were included the two events which have 
exercised incomparably the most controlling influence on the 
character and fortunes of our country. At the very time the 
Mayflower, with its precious burden, was engaged in its peril- 
ous voyage to Plymouth, another ship, far otherwise laden, was 
approaching the harbor of Virginia. It was a Dutch man-of- 
war, and its cargo consisted in part of twenty slaves, which 
were subjected to sale on their arrival, and with which the 
foundations of domestic slavery in North America were laid. 

I see those two fate-freighted vessels, laboring under the 
divided destinies of the same nation, and striving against the 
billows of the same sea, like the principles of good and evil 
advancing side by side on the same great ocean of human life. 
I hear from the one the sighs of wretchedness, the groans of 
despair, the curses and clankings of struggling captivity, sound- 
ing and swelling on the same gale, which bears only from the 
other the pleasant voices of prayer and praise, the cheerful 
melody of contentment and happiness, the glad, the glorious 
" anthem of the free." O, could some angel arm, like that 
which seems to guide and guard the Pilgrim bark, be now inter- 
posed to arrest, avert, dash down, and overwhelm its accursed 
compeer! But it may not be. They have both reached in 
safety the place of their destination. Freedom and Slavery, in 
one and the same year, have landed on these American shores. 
And American liberty, like the Victor of ancient Rome, is 
doomed, let us hope nut forever, to endure the presence of a 
fettered cai)tive as a companion in her Car of Triumph I 



THE PILGRIM FATHERS. 37 

Gentlemen of the New England Society in the city of New 
York, — I must detain you no longer. In preparing to discharge 
the duty, which you have done me the unmerited honor to as- 
sign me in the celebration of this hallowed Anniversary, I was 
more than once tempted to quit the narrow track of remark 
which I have now pursued, and to indulge in speculations or dis- 
cussions of a more immediate and general interest. But it 
seemed to me, that if there was any day in the year which be- 
longed of right to the past and the dead, this was that day, and 
to the past and the dead I resolved to devote my exclusive atten- 
tion. But though I have fulfilled that resolution, as you will 
bear me witness, with undeviating fidehty, many of the topics 
which I had proposed to myself seem hardly to have been en- 
tered upon, — some of them scarcely approached. The princi- 
ples of the Pilgrims, the virtues of the Pilgrims, the faults of 
the Pilgrims — alas I there are enough always ready to make 
the most of these : — the personal characters of their brave and 
pious leaders, Bradford, Brewster, Carver, Winslow, Alden, Al- 
lerton, Standish, — the day shall not pass away without their 
names being once at least audibly and honorably pronounced : — 
the gradual rise and progress of the colony they planted, and of 
the old Commonwealth with which it was early incorporated : — 
the origin and growth of the other colonies, Rhode Island, Con- 
necticut, New Hampshire, and the rest, which were afterwards 
included within the limits of New England, and many of the 
sons of all of which are doubtless present here this day : — the 
history of New England as a whole, its great deeds and great 
men, its schools and scholars, its heroes and battle-fields, its 
ingenuity and industry, its soil, — hard and stony, indeed, but of 
inestimable richness in repelling from its culture the idle, the 
ignorant, and the enslaved, and in developing the energies of free, 
intelligent, independent labor : — the influences of New Eng- 
land abroad as well as at home, its emigration, ever onward, 
with the axe in one hand and the Bible in the other, clearing 
out the wild growth of buckeye and hickory, and planting the 
trees of knowledge and of life, driving the buffalo from forest 
to lake, from lake to prairie, and from prairie to the sea, till 
the very memory of its existence would seem likely to be lost, 

4 



38 THE PILGRIM FATHERS. 

but for the noble City which its pursuers, pausing for an instant 
on tiicir track, have called by its name, and founded on its 
favorite haunt: — these and a hundred other themes of interest- 
ing and appropriate discussion, have, I am sensible, been quite 
omitted. But I have already exhausted your patience, or cer- 
tainly my own strength, and I hasten to relieve them both. 

It has been suggested. Gentlemen, by one of the French tra- 
vellers, whose opinions I have just cited, that, though the Yan- 
kee has set his mark on the United States during the last half 
century, and though " he still rules the nation," that yet, the 
physical labor of civilization is now nearly brought to an end, 
the physical basis of society entirely laid, and that other influ- 
ences are soon about to predominate in rearing up the social 
superstructure of our nation. I hail the existence of this Asso- 
ciation, and of others like it in all parts of the Union, bound 
too'ether by the golden cords of " friendship, charity, and mutual 
assistance," as a pledge that New England principles, whether in 
ascendency or under depression in the nation at large, will never 
stand in need of warm hearts and bold tongues to cherish and 
vindicate them. But, at any rate, let us rejoice that they have so 
long pervaded the country and so long prevailed in her institu- 
tions. Let us rejoice that the basis of her society has been laid 
by Yankee arms. Let us rejoice that the corner-stone of our 
republican edifice was hewn out from the old, original, primitive, 
Plymouth quarry. In what remains to be done, either in finishing 
or in ornamenting that edifice, softer and more pliable materials 
may, perhaps, be preferred, — the New England granite may be 
thought too rough and unwieldy, — the architects may condemn 
it, — the builders may reject it, — but still, still, it will remain 
the deep and enduring foundation, not to be removed without 
undermining the whole fabric. And should that fabric be des- 
tined to stand, even when bad government shall descend upon 
it like the rains, and corruption come round about it like the 
Hoods, and faction, discord, disunion, and anarchy blow and 
beat upon it lilvc the winds, — as God grant it may stand for- 
ever I — it will still owe its stability to no more effective earthly 
influence, than, tuat it was founded on pilgrim rock. 



THE INFLUENCE OF COMMERCE. 



AN ADDRESS, DELIVERED BEFORE THE BOSTON MERCANTILE LIBRARY 
ASSOCIATION, ON THE OCCASION OF THEIR TWENTY-FIFTH ANNIVERSARY, 
OCTOBER 15, 1845. 



Mr. President and Gentlemen op the Mercantile Library Association,— 
I AM greatly honored by the part which you have assigned me 
on this occasion, and by thus being permitted to add my name 
to the list of distinguished persons who have addressed you at 
your anniversary celebrations, John Davis, George Putnam, 
Rufus Choate, Edward Everett, — I need name no more of 
them to justify me in saying, that any one may feel proud at 
being called on to follow in such footsteps. I need name no 
more of them, certainly, to warrant me in adding, that no one 
can fail to feel some touches, also, of a less welcome and less 
inspiriting emotion than that of pride, as he finds himself rising 
to tread in such tracks, and begins to realize, by something of a 
practical experiment, the full measure of the strides before him. 
It is grateful to remember at such a moment, that I am any 
thing but a volunteer in your service, and that there are those 
present who can bear witness, how gladly I would have been 
excused again, as more than once in years past, from encounter- 
ing its perilous contrasts. And now, in complying at last with 
your kind solicitations, I propose to enter upon no labored dis- 
cussion of formal topics, but rather conforming myself to the 
spirit of an anniversary and an introductory address, as well as 
to what I understand to be your own expectations and wishes 
this evening, to find the subject of my remarks in the circum- 



■iO THE INFLUENCE OF COMMERCE. 

stances of the occasion, and in the character of the institution 
before me. 

You have arrived, Gentlemen, at a marked epoch in your his- 
tory. You are assembled to commemorate your Twenty-Fifth 
Anniversary. A quarter of a century has passed away since, at 
a little meetinsf held at the Commercial Coffee House in this 
city, under the lead of a gentleman, whose name has been 
honorably connected with more than one of our most valued 
institutions, as well as with repeated terms of popular and effi- 
cient administration of the chief magistracy of our city, (Mr. 
Theodore Lyman,) your association took its rise. Your progress 
was for many years slow. The excellent report of your last 
board of directors exhibits a record of early trials and struggles, 
such as no institution, not founded upon the rock of true prin- 
ciple and real merit, could have survived. It points, indeed, to 
more than one period in your history, when you found it all but 
impossible to maintain your organization, and when you had 
little more than a name to live. The persevering energy of 
some of your early members, however, has not been unrewarded 
in the end. Within a few years past all obstacles to your ad- 
vancement have been overcome. Large additions have been 
made to your funds, to your library, and to your numbers, now 
amounting to nearly eight hundred ; and you have given a fresh 
pledge, within a few months past, that your institution shall be 
sustained and perpetuated, by asking and accepting a charter 
from the Commonwealth. At the close, then, of a quarter of a 
century since the date of your original organization, you have 
assembled here to-night, in the enjoyment of every circumstance, 
both of prosperity for the present and of hope for the future, and 
in the presence of this crowded company of patrons and friends, 
to celebrate your first anniversary as an incorporated associa- 
tion. 

I congratulate you, gentlemen, most cordially on this consum- 
mation. I congratulate this community, that your association 
has outlived the discouragements and embarrassments of its 

O 

infancy, and has at length taken its place among the public and 
permanent institutions of our city. A legislative charter has of 
itself, indeed, added little to your claims to consideration. In 



THE INFLUENCE OF COMMERCE. 41 

some quarters, it may rather be thought to have rendered you 
an object of suspicion, jealousy, and odium ; though I think it 
would puzzle the sturdiest decrier of corporations to put his 
finger upon the clause in your charter, which clothes you with 
powers formidable to any thing, but idleness, ignorance, and 
vice. But it has certainly furnished you with facilities for self- 
government, and for the management and transmission of pro- 
perty, and for setting a just limit to the responsibility of your 
members, and for securing a just accountability for the bounty 
of your benefactors, which cannot fail to exert a most auspi- 
cious influence on your future condition and progress. And 
may it not be hoped, as among its incidental advantages, that it 
may have armed you thus early against prejudices, which may, 
at any time or under any influences, seek to get possession of 
your minds, in reference to a species of social machinery, which 
has been, in my judgment, more potent than power-loom or 
steam-engine, in advancing the best interests of society ? May 
it not be hoped, that your early enlistment in the ranks of a 
chartered company, may impress you indelibly with the true 
idea, that though, according to the musty and moth-eaten maxim 
of the law, corporations may have no souls, those who consti- 
tute them have; and that they are entitled to be judged, in their 
corporate as well as in their individual capacity, by their de- 
signs, their objects, and their acts ? 

Your designs, Mr. President and Gentlemen, are inscribed, in 
brief but comprehensive terms, on the face of your charter. 
You have been made a corporation " for the purpose of diffusing 
and promoting knowledge among young men, (including all 
from fourteen years of age upwards,) now engaged in, or des- 
tined for, the mercantile profession ; " and while you are faith- 
ful to such ends, you cannot fail to meet with the respect, the 
encouragement, the cordial approbation and support of all good 
men. For myself, certainly, in whatever light I look at such an 
association, whether in regard to the present circumstances or 
the future pursuits of those who compose it, its interest and im- 
portance seem hardly susceptible of exaggeration. 

I see in it, in*the first place, an instrument of unspeakable 
profit and preservation — intellectual profit and moral preserva- 
4* 



42 THE INFLUENCE OF COMMERCE. 

tion — to vast numbers of young men, who in successive years 
shall be enrolled among its members. I see gathered nightly in 
its halls, within well-stored alcoves, and around tables spread 
with whatever can nourish the intellect or stimulate the soul of 
man — a feast " which, after, no repenting draws " — those who 
might otherwise be led away by the temptations of profligacy 
or crime. The fresh and unstained country boy, sent out in the 
first flush of his young heart from the parental home, to en- 
counter the contaminations of a great city as he may, with a 
hope which has no horizon short of gaining the whole world, 
but without a thought of the peril of losing his own soul ; the 
young lad of yet sadder fortune, to whom, in the providence of 
God, there remains no parental home, no precious influence of 
a father's or a mother's eye, beneath which he may shelter him- 
self after the toil of to-day is over, and gather fresh strength for 
the trials and temptations of to-morrow ; and those whom a 
hundred other nameless peculiarities of condition or of temper- 
ament may render the ready victims of the snares that lie con- 
cealed, or of the pitfalls that gape openly, at the corners of every 
street of a crowded metropolis like this ; — I see them all, not 
merely drawn off from their exposure to evil, but provided with 
the means of innocent recreation and valuable improvement. 

If there be a class of institutions more important than any or 
all others, to the moral character of our community, it is that 
which furnishes entertainment and employment during the even- 
ings — the long winter, and the short summer evenings, too — 
for young men ; and more especially for those, who either have 
no homes to which they may resort, or for whom the influences 
of the paternal roof have been in any way paralyzed. Libra- 
ries and reading-rooms for the merchants' clerks and the me- 
chanics' apprentices of our city, numerous enough and spacious 
enongh to accommodate them all, and furnished with every 
temptation which the amplest endowments can supply; — these 
are among the most effective instruments which can be devised, 
for advancing our highest moral and social interests, and are 
entitled lo the most liberal encouragement of all true philan- 
thropists. It is not enough, that the tipplinf^-shops and gam- 
bling-tables are broken u|). There is mischief still for idle 



THE INFLUENCE OF COMMERCE. 43 

minds to devise, and for Idle hands to do. Innocent entertain- 
ment and useful occupation must be supplied, and supplied 
with some circumstance of interest and attraction and fascina- 
tion, if possible, or you have only driven dissipation and vice 
from the public haunt to the private hiding place, where they 
will lose nothing of their grossness or their guilt, by losing all 
their apprehension of exposure. And when the cheering spec- 
tacle is exhibited of the young men of the city, associating 
themselves for this great end of their own self-defence ; organiz- 
ing themselves, not into a company, like that recently instituted 
by the merchants' clerks of London, for making up to their em- 
ployers out of a common stock, the losses which may result 
from their own annual, ascertained, average of fraud and 
roguery, but into a company to insure themselves against the 
vices and immoralities and idleness from which those losses and 
those frauds flow as from their fountain, — what heart can 
refuse them its sincerest sympathy, what tongue its most en- 
couraging word, what hand its most efficient aid! 

If there be an appeal for sympathy and encouragement which 
no patriotic or philanthropic breast can resist, it is that of young 
men struggling against the temptations which beset their path, 
and striving to prepare themselves, intellectually and morally, 
for discharging the duties which are about to devolve on their 
maturer life. And if there be a spectacle calculated to fill every 
such breast with joy, and to reward a thousand-fold those who 
may have contributed in any way to the result, it is that of 
young men who have thus striven and struggled with success. 
There is a name in history. It is associated with some of the 
proudest achievements of the proudest empire in the world. It 
has been shouted along the chariot ways of imperial Rome on 
occasions of her most magnificent triumphs. Whole volumes 
have been filled with the brilliant acts which have illustrated 
that name in three successive generations. But there is a little 
incident which takes up hardly ten lines on the historic page, 
which has invested it with a charm higher and nobler than all 
these. The Sybils, we are told, had prophesied that the Bona 
Dea should be introduced into Rome by the best man among 
the Romans. The Senate was accordingly busied to pass judg- 



44 THE INFLUENCE OF COMMERCE. 

ment who was the best man in the city. And it is no small 
tribute to the Roman virtue of that day, that all men are said 
to have been more ambitious to get the victory in that dispute, 
than if they had stood to be elected to the highest and most 
lucrative offices and honors within the gift of the Senate or the 
people. The Senate at last selected Publius Scipio ; of whom 
the only record is, that he was the nephew of Cneus, who was 
killed in Spain, and that he was ^ young man, who had never 
attained to that lowest of all the public honors of the empire, 
for which it was only necessary for him to have reached the age 
of two-and-twenty years. We may admire — we must admire 

the resistless energy, the matchless heroism, of those two 

thunderbolts of war — Scipio, the conqueror of Hannibal, and 
Scipio, the destroyer of Carthage. But who does not feel that 
this little story has thrown around that name a halo of peerless 
brilliancy ; yes, one 

Which shall new lustre boast, 
When victors' wreaths and monarchs' gems 
Shall blend in common dust ! 

But I proposed to speak of your Institution in its relations 
rather to the future pursuits, than to the present circumstances, 
of those of whom it is composed. I see before me and around 
me, as its members, the future 7nerchants of Boston; those, who 
in the progress of time, are to take the places of the intelligent, 
the enterprising, the wealthy and honorable men, who now carry 
on the vast foreign and domestic trade of this great commercial 
emporium. To take the places which have been filled by the 
past and present merchants of Boston ! How much, Mr. Presi- 
dent, is included in this idea I How much of solemn responsi- 
bility for you and your associates ; how much of deep concern 
and momentous import to the prosperity and honor of our 
beloved city I Let us pause, before passing to less local and 
limited views, and reflect for a few moments on the influence 
which has been exerted by commerce, and by those who have 
been engaged in commerce, on the fortunes and character of the 
pleasant place, in wliich we all thank God this night and every 
night of our lives, I trust, that our lots have been cast. 



THE INFLUENCE OF COMMERCE. 45 

The site of our City seems originally to have been selected 
with no particular reference to commercial advantages. Other 
thoughts than those of trade engrossed the attention of the first 
settlers of Boston. They sought security from the mingled 
}Dolitical and ecclesiastical oppressions of the old world, and a 
refuge for the enjoyment of civil and religious liberty. These 
they could find nowhere but in the wilderness of this new Hemi- 
sphere ; but having sought them and found them here, all other 
matters were, at the outset, certainly, comparatively indifferent 
to them. On what precise spot of this vast solitude, — "all 
before them, where to choose," — they should plant themselves, 
mattered little, save as their immediate safety and sustenance 
and quiet might be affected ; and by these considerations, far 
more than by any larger views of future advantage or aggran- 
dizement to themselves or their posterity, they seem to have been 
governed in the selection of that spot. 

They desired safety from the assaults of merciless savages. 
Hence they would not go far into the interior, where they might 
be surrounded and cut off. They desired to be as near as three 
thousand miles of perilous and pitiless ocean would allow them 
to be, to the dear friends and families from whom they had just 
been sadly separated in England ; to be where they could readily 
receive and welcome and embrace those who might still be 
moved to come over and join them, and where they might hear 
as often and as early as possible from those who might continue 
to stay behind. The many necessities of food and clothing, 
too, which must still be supplied them from abroad, would add 
a yet stronger link to the considerations which thus chained 
them to the coast. 

There were some necessaries of life, however, which must be 
furnished on the spot, or not at all. One of these was fresh 
water to drink. And strange as it strikes us in these days, when 
it would seem impossible — nay, when it is impossible — for 
the thirst of our people to be palatably or wholesomely slaked 
from day to day, unless Long Pond, or Spot Pond, or Charles 
River, be brought bodily into our midst, and when we are likely 
to suffer the tortures of Tantalus until conflicting interests and 
discordant opinions have fought themselves into a state of recon- 



46 THE INFLUENCE OF COMMERCE. 

ciliation or compromise, — strange, I say, as it appears at such 
a moment, it was the fresh water, and not the salt water, advan- 
tages of the situation, which determined the locality of our city, 
" An excellent spring of water " is recorded — and I cannot but 
wish that it still existed somewhere else than on the ancient 
records — as among the most prominent causes for planting 
Boston upon this peninsula ; while not a word is said of yon- 
der capacious and noble harbor. 

Other views, more or less capricious, entered into the choice 
of a location. " Governor Winthrop, (we are informed by Cap- 
tain Clap,) purposed to set down his station about Cambridge, or 
somewhere on the river ; but viewing the place, he liked that 
plain neck, that was then called Blackstone's neck." And Wood, 
in his New England Prospect, would seem to imply that our 
fathers might have been influenced by their desire to obtain 
security from other foes besides the Indians, — when he enume- 
rates, with so felicitous an example of the climax, among the 
principal recommendations of this "plain neck," its singular 
exemption from those three great annoyances, " wolves, rattle- 
snakes, and mosquitos ! " 

At any rate, the idea of founding a great commercial metro- 
polis was not in all the thoughts of the first planters of Boston. 
And yet within a very few years from its original settlement 
the commercial destiny of the place was shaped and deter- 
mined. Indeed, I can hardly consider as any thing less than a 
clear foreshadowing of that destiny, — if rather it were not the 
first step in its fulfilment, — the building and launching on the 
Mystic river, by Governor Winthrop himself, in 1631, within 
one year from the day from which the existence of our city 
bears date, of the first Boston vessel. A little bark of only 
thirty tons though it was, yet called the Blessing of the Bay, 
and launched on the fourth day of July, it seems a beautiful 
archetype of those countless blessings of the Bay, which were 
to be witnessed and enjoyed here, when the commerce of Boston 
should have had time to establish and expand itself, and when 
another and more memorable, far distant but even then inevita- 
ble and almost foreseen, Fourth of July, should have thrown 
over that commerce, — never, 1 trust, to be furled or rent in 



THE INFLUENCE OF COMMERCE. 47 

twain, — the glorious banner of a free, independent, and united 
Republic ! 

Certainly, Gentlemen, almost from that early day, the history 
of the rise and progress of our city is the history of the rise and 
progress of its commerce. For the first few years, indeed, the 
trade of the place was confined principally to a little barter with 
the natives for furs and skins. And for some years afterwards, 
the records of mere mercantile transactions are overlaid by the 
more important registration of the establishment of towns and 
churches and schools, of fundamental laws, and the tribunals for 
their administration and execution. As early as 1633, however, 
we find mention of the building of another ship of twice the 
burden of the first ; and in 1634 we hear of John Cogan set- 
ting up the first shop on the peninsula, who thus, perhaps, may 
be entitled to be remembered as the first Boston merchant. In 
1639, we learn that the ship-builders and fishermen of this and 
the neighboring settlements of the colony, had become so nume- 
rous and of such importance in the estimation of the people, as 
to be made the subject of a special exemption from what our 
fathers, in their ignorant simplicity, considered as among the 
most imperative of their civil and Christian duties — milUary 
training's. And in the same year, we catch another most inter- 
esting glimpse of the operations of our growing trade, in a com- 
plaint solemnly considered by the General Court, against alleged 
oppression in the sale of foreign commodities ; when Mr. Robert 
Keayne, who kept a shop in Boston, — (who will be remembered, 
perhaps, as the first commander of the Ancient and Honorable 
Artillery Company, and who has secured for himself a less 
enviable notoriety as the author of a Will which occupies no 
less than one hundred and fifty-seven pages on our Probate 
records,) — having been convicted of taking in some cases 
above sixpence in the shilling profit, in some above eight-pence, 
and in some small things above two for one, was adjudged to 
pay a penalty of two hundred dollars ! 

On this occasion, the Church, as well as the State, has left re- 
cord of its views of commercial matters. Not only was Captain 
Keayne subjected to the censure of the ecclesiastical synod, but 
Mr. Cotton, the ever-honored pastor from whose residence at 



48 THE INFLUENCE OF COMMERCE. 

Boston, in Lincolnshire, our city derived its name, laid open in 
the most solemn form, on the next lecture day, the error of the 
principles upon which Captain Keayne had attempted to justify 
his extortion, and gave sundry special directions for the con- 
scientious conducting of mercantile business. The most import- 
ant principle of commercial dealing which was condemned from 
the pulpit on that occasion as false, was, " that a man might 
sell as dear as he can, and buy as cheap as he can ; " while it was 
prescribed as one of the positive rules of trade, that " where a 
man loseth by casualty of sea, it is a loss cast upon himself by 
Providence, and he may not ease himself by casting it on ano- 
ther ; for so a man should seem to provide against all providen- 
ces, so that he should never lose." The first of the preacher's 
doctrines soon after received a practical illustration and enforce- 
ment, in the case of a mechanic, who for asking an excessive price 
for a pair of stocks which he had been hired to frame for the pur- 
poses of justice, had the honor to sit in them the first hour himself I 

I need not say, Mr. President, that it could not have been 
by 'recking the rede' of that day's lecture, that the commerce of 
Boston continued to advance. But most rapid progress it cer- 
tainly made, as we find ample evidence in the facts, that before 
the year 1645, more than two hundred years ago, a ship of over 
400 tons was no stranger to our shipwrights ; and that in the 
course of this single year we hear of the arrival of twelve or 
fourteen large ships bringing stores of linens, woollens and other 
commodities from London, and carrying back in part payment, 
more than 20,000 bushels of corn. Concurrent testimony is 
found, also, in the quaint but significant expressions of Edward 
Johnson, who tells us, in his Wonder- Working Providence, that 
" our maritan towns began to increase roundly, especially Boston, 
the which of a poor country village, in twice seven years is be- 
come like unto a small city, and is in election to become mayor 
town suddenly, chiefly increased by trade by sea." 

I may not take up more time in describing the gradual stages 
by which our city has advanced to the condition in which we 
now find it. Nor is any such description necessary to substantiate 
the well-understood fact, that in all periods of its history, com- 
merce has been the grand and leading element of its prosperity 



THE INFLUENCE OF COMMERCE. 49 

and progress. Indeed, if there were no historical records to 
appeal to, it would require but a glance at Boston as it was, to 
convince any one, that nothing but the most judicious, enter- 
prising, and fortunate improvement of commercial advantages 
could have made it what it is. What but Commerce, gathering 
about itself those mechanic arts which are its indispensable and 
honored handmaids, could have converted into such a crowded 
scene of life and labor as we see around us, that old plain 
neck, which was but six hundred acres in extent, when it was 
purchased of William Blackstone for thirty pounds, and which 
even now, when as many more acres have been redeemed from 
the sea and added to its dimensions, is still hardly larger than 
an ordinary Western farm I Agriculture, it is plain, could have 
found no elbow-room for swinging a scythe here ; while as to 
maufactures, the only motive power to turn a spinning-wheel, 
within the reach or the knowledge of our fathers, was one, 
which, without any disparagement to its magic influence either 
in that day or this, whether in a glass slipper or a prunella boot, 
could scarcely have rocked out the destiny of a great city. 

There is little risk in asserting, though I have not been able 
precisely to verify the fact, that in territorial dimensions, Boston 
is one of the very smallest incorporated cities in the world. In 
the order of population, there are nearly a hundred cities which 
stand before it. What place it holds on the scale of intelligence 
and influence and reputation and honor at home and abroad, it 
may not become us to pronounce. It is a city set on a hill — 
yes, on three hills ; it cannot be hid. Let others praise us and 
not our own mouths, — strangers, and not our own lips. Yet 
we may not shut our eyes to the fact, that in view of its mer- 
cantile relations, it is already the second city on the American 
continent, and hardly below the fourth, certainly not below the 
fifth, on the face of the globe. Nor may we be blind to the 
operation of commercial causes, which, if not frustrated by want 
of intelligence and enterprise, seem to promise, that the rapidity 
of its progress in time past, shall bear but the same proportion 
to that in time to come, which the velocity of the creaking and 
trundling wagons which were so lately its only vehicles of inland 
transportation, bears to that of the gigantic enginery, which is 

5 



50 THE INFLUENCE OP COMMERCE. 

now shooting along our highways at every hour of the day and 
from every quarter of the compass, with a whistle like that of 
Roderick Dhu, and with a tramp heavier than that of any host 
of armed men which that whistle ever mustered either to the 
feast or to the fray ! 

In preparing yourselves, then. Mr. President and Gentlemen, 
to take the places of the merchants of Boston, you are preparing 
yourselves to caiTy on that great business which has made our 
city almost all that it is, and which must make it all that it is to 
be. Upon your intelligence and information, upon your energy 
and enterprise, upon your integrity and honor, it will in no small 
degree, under God, depend, — whether its course shall still be 
onward and upward, or whether, when the present generation 
shall have passed away, it shall begin to follow the fortunes of 
other commercial cities, once the renowned of the world, whose 
merchants were princes and their traffickers the honorable of 
the earth, but which have now a name and a place only in 
history. 

But I have alluded thus far, Mr. President, to the least and 
most inconsiderable part of what is implied in the idea of taking 
the places of the past and present merchants of Boston. You 
are to take their places not merely as merchants, but as men ; 
not merely in conducting commerce, but in sustaining character; 
not merely in accumulating the aggregate wealth which is to 
swell the importance of Boston in the columns of a statistical 
table, but in the possession and use of that individual wealth 
of which this aggregate is made up, and on the manner of 
whose employment the truest glory of our city must always in 
so great a degree depend. What has given us our noblest dis- 
tinction as a community in time past ? To what page of our 
history do we point with the liveliest and justest pride ? By 
what record would we be most willing to be judged this night, 
of men or of angels ? That, beyond all question, which con- 
tains the account current of our public and private charities. 
That, beyond all question, so recently and admirably summed 
up by a late distinguished mayor of our city, (Mr. Eliot,) which 
exhibits the long catalogue of those munificent donations by 



THE INFLUENCE OF COMMERCE. 61 

which the great interests of education, morality, and religion 
have been sustained and promoted at home and abroad ; by 
which almost every want of suffering humanity is supplied or 
alleviated ; by which, in all but the miraculous sense which may 
be attributed to God alone, the blind receive their sight, the 
lame walk, the deaf hear, and the poor have the gospel preached 
unto them. 

And from whence has this munificence proceeded ? From 
whom have these princely endowments come ? To what pro- 
fession or calling in life belonged, or still belong, the great 
majority of those whose names are inscribed on so many of our 
halls and hospitals and asylums and athenaeums and chapels, — 
on the professorships of our colleges, the lectures of our insti- 
tutes, the prizes of our common schools ? Who was that Peter 
Faneuil, whose name is written where it will be remembered, 
if not as long as the sun and the moon shall endure, yet cer- 
tainly as long as a single star of our own constellation shall be 
left, to guide the worshippers of American liberty to its cradle ? 
Who were John McLean, Samuel Eliot, James Perkins, Israel , 
Thorndike, Samuel Parkman, John Lowell, Jr., John Parker, 
Benjamin Bussey, Israel Munson, and a host of others among 
the dead ? I may not violate the proprieties of such an occa- 
sion, by asking in what profession are enrolled the names of men 
no less distinguished by their munificence, but still living in our 
midst, and some of them present here with us to-night. Yet 
you would not forgive me, gentlemen, nor could I excuse it to 
myself, were I to omit a more distinct allusion to the latest and 
largest benefactor of your own association ; one, whose liberality 
within the past year has more than doubled your pecuniary 
resources ; one, by whose encouragement you are now cherish- 
ing the hope, that those resources may soon be relieved from the 
exhausting load of a large annual rent, and that no distant day 
may find you engaged, as your sister association of Philadelphia 
has but now been, in dedicating a hall of your own. Thomas 
Handasyd Perkins, however, I need not say, depends on no acts 
of liberality or words of encouragement to this association, for 
his title to the affection and admiration of us all. To a long 
life of unsurpassed commercial enterprise and honor, he has 



52 THE INFLUENCE OP COMMERCE. 

seemed to add a second life of equally unsurpassed benevolence 
and munificence. 

" For his bounty, 
There is no winter in 't ; an autumn 'tis 
That grows the more by reaping." 

You will all join me in wishing, that he may have a safe and 
speedy voyage on his return to his native land ; and that he may 
still live long to enjoy the respect and veneration he has so richly 
earned. 

I would not be understood, Mr. President, in any spirit of 
indiscriminate eulogy, to ascribe to the merchants of Boston, 
past, present, or to come, an undivided and exclusive possession 
of that most excellent gift of charity. They would scorn to lay 
claim to any monopoly of benevolence. The charity of the 
heart, they remember, as we all do, is not to be measured by 
moneyed contributions. They do not forget ivlio pronounced the 
widow's mite to be more than all the gifts of the rich men. 
They do not forget where it is implied, that a man may bestow 
all his goods to feed the poor, yet have not charity. They would 
be the last to deny that their brethren of all other occupations, 
and their sisters too, have contributed, always according to their 
means, to every object which has justly appealed to the general 
sympathy and succor. But we all know, that the full hand 
must be united with the generous heart, that an ample fortune 
must be combined with benevolent impulses, for the accom- 
plishment of those signal acts of humanity which have given a 
character to our community. And for this union of disposition 
and ability, for this rare combination of wealth and will, it 
seems plain to me, that we must look in time to come, as we 
have done in time past, to the successful merchants of our city. 

Indeed, whether we are to judge by the experience of the 
past, or by the nature of things, it may be safely said, that the 
great private fortunes of our country are to be almost entirely 
the fruit of mercantile enterprise. Agriculture may always look 
with confidence for an honorable remuneration for its toils. It 
may thank God, that to it has been granted the blessing for 



THE INFLUENCE OF COMMERCE. 53 

which the pious man prayed, — neither poverty nor riches. It 
may read, we may all read, something more and better than a 
curse, in the doom' which has declared to the tiller of the soil — 
" in the sweat of thy brow, thou shalt eat bread," The honest 
yeoman of our land, indeed, can find no fitter terms for his song 
of joy, as he goes forth to his labor in the morning, or plods his 
wearier way homeward at niaht, than those well-remembered 
words of Poor Richard : 



" He that by the plough would thrive, 
Himself must either hold or drive." 



He may rejoice — we may all rejoice, that so little temptation 
is held out to accumulated capital to turn to agriculture for 
profit; to add acre to acre, and field to field, for mere invest- 
ment; and thus to break up that system of small, subdivided 
proprietorship, which constitutes at once the true independence 
of our farmers, and the best security for our freedom. 

The Mechanic Arts will not fail of " a fair day's wage for a 
fair day's work," as long as our government shall not repudiate 
one of its great original debts, by being false to the protection 
of its own industry. 

The larger Manufactures of modern times, may, for a few 
years longer, now and then, by fits and starts, make dividends 
large enough to be a nine days' wonder, and to provoke the jea- 
lousy of those who can see nothing but their own losses in other 
people's gains, or who do not scruple to avow a deeper interest 
in the welfare of Old England, than of New, — of Manchester 
and Liverpool, than of Boston and Lowell. But when once 
permanently established, and placed beyond the peradventure of 
Presidential elections and Congressional majorities, the common 
laws of supply and demand, and the levelling influences of an 
unrestricted domestic competition, will leave little margin in the 
balance of their accounts, for the notes of exclamation either of 
envy or of wonder. 

To commercial pursuits alone, seem to belong permanently 
those elements of enterprise, adventure, and speculation, which 
furnish opportunities for great gains, — those tides, « which taken 

6* 



54 THE INFLUENCE OF COMMERCE. 

at the flood lead on to fortune." The merchant has, indeed, no 
Midas touch. The same course of trade which enriched one 
man to-day, may ruin another to-morrow. A few dollars, earned 
on a Commencement day, by ferrying passengers over Charles 
Eiver when there was no bridge, shipped to Lisbon in the shape 
of fish, and from thence to London in the shape of fruit, and 
from thence brouafht home to be reinvested in fish, and to be 
reentered upon the same triangular circuit of trade, laid the 
foundations of the largest fortune of the day, a hundred years 
ago. Yet many a man has plied a ferryboat over Charles River, 
before and since, and died without an oholus to discharge his 
own fare over the Styx, Great losses, as well as great gains, 
may await the best concerted schemes of foreign or domestic 
trade ; and more of you, my young friends, will be called on to 
endure the reverses, than to improve the successes of mercantile 
life. It has been calculated, that out of every hundred persons 
who have engaged in mercantile business in our own city, not 
less than ninety-five have failed at least once, during a term of 
forty years. And noble examples are within the remembrance 
of us all, of the manner in which such reverses should be met; 
examples, which have recently shed a fresh lustre over the mer- 
cantile character of our city ; examples, beneath whose brilliant 
light, it may be hoped that any spirit of fraud or concealment 
which may still be lurking in any breast within the reach of its 
rays, may be changed and purified, before the touch of misfor- 
tune shall have revealed it, and 

" Like the stained web, which whitens in the sun, 
Grow pure by being purely shone upon ! " 

But the remark is still true, Mr. President, that the great pri- 
vate fortunes of the country are to be hereafter, as they certainly 
have been heretofore, the fruit of successful commerce ; and that 
the influences of accumulated wealth are to be wielded, in most 
cases, by members of the mercantile profession. Yes, gentlemen, 
in succeeding to the places of the merchants of Boston, you are 
to become responsible for the exercise of that vast social power, 
on which the comfort and happiness and prosperity and even 
bread of so many thousands of your fellow-citizens will depend. 



THE INFLUENCE OF COMMERCE. 55 

It will be yours, especially, to decide, whether that stream of 
public and private charity, which has so long made glad and glo- 
rious the city of our pride, shall flow on in its beauty and its 
strength for another generation ; or whether it shall presently be 
absorbed in the stagnant pool of avarice, or be diverted into the 
even more poisonous channel of a profligate luxury. Well may 
you prepare yourselves for the discharge of this high responsibi- 
lity. Well may we all take an interest in your preparation. 
Well may all good men aid and encourage you in your efl'orts to 
acquire those enlightened views, those enlarged and liberal senti- 
ments, that refined and elevated intelligence, that strong, clear, 
deep sense of moral and religious obligation, which good books, 
and well-spent evenings, and grave deliberations, and able and 
eloquent discourses, are calculated to impart ; which shall lead 
you to regard wealth as mainly valuable as an instrument of 
philanthropy ; which shall teach you the unworthiness of all other 
luxury compared with the "luxury of doing good;" which shall 
enable you to catch, if possible, something of the spirit of that 
great Athenian philosopher — himself, as we are told, a merchant 
in his youth — who regarded the hoarded treasures and gorgeous 
trappings of a Monarch whose name has come down to us as 
the very synonyme of unbounded wealth, as not to be named in 
comparison either with the patriotism of a humble citizen, who 
lived for his children and died for his country, or with the piety 
of those heroic young men, who, rather than the religion of their 
country should lack any of its appointed rites, hesitated not to 
put their own necks to the yoke, and to drag their priestess 
mother a distance of five and forty stadia to the temple, only to 
lay down their exhausted lives at the foot of the altar, and to 
mingle their expiring breath with a mother's prayers, in one 
sweet sacrifice to the gods whom they ignorantly worshipped ! * 

I pass, Mr. President and Gentlemen, from these local topics, 
to a brief consideration of the pursuits for which you are prepar- 
ing, in their larger and more comprehensive relations. 

* There are few more charming passages in ancient or modern history, than that 
in which Herodotus describes the interview between Solon and CrcEsus, and in which 
the philosopher, on being asked by the Monarch who was the most enviable person he 
had ever known, is represented as having named, tirst, Tellus the Athcncan, and next, 
the young Cleobis and Biton. 



56 THE INFLUENCE OF COMMERCE. 

If one were called on to say, what, upon the whole, was the 
most distinctive and characterizing feature of the age in which 
we live, I think he might reply, that it was the rapid and steady 
progress of the influence of Commerce upon the social and poli- 
tical condition of man. The policy of the civilized world is now 
everywhere and eminently a commercial policy. No longer do 
the nations of the earth measure their relative consequence by 
the number and discipline of their armies upon the land, or their 
armadas upon the sea. The tables of their imports and exports, 
the tonnage of their commercial marines, the value and variety of 
their home trade, the sum total of their mercantile exchanges, — 
these furnish the standards by which national power and national 
importance are now marked and measured. Even extent of 
territorial dominion is valued little, save as it gives scope and 
verge for mercantile transactions ; and the great use of colonies 
is what Lord Sheffield declared it to be half a century ago, " the 
monopoly of their consumption, and the carriage of their pro- 
duce." 

Look to the domestic administration, or the foreign negotia- 
tion of our own, or any other civilized country. Listen to the 
debates of the two houses of the Imperial Parliament. What 
are the subjects of their gravest and most frequent discussions? 
The succession of families ? The marriage of princes ? The con- 
quest of provinces? The balance of power? — No; the balance 
of trade, the sliding scale, corn, cotton, sugar, timber, — these 
furnish now the homespun threads upon which the statesmen 
of modern days are obliged to string the pearls of their parlia- 
mentary rhetoric. Nay, the Prime Minister himself is heard 
discoursing upon the duties to be levied upon the seed of a cer- 
tain savory vegetable — the use of which not even Parisian au- 
thority has rendered quite genteel upon a fair day — as gravely, 
as if it were as true in regard to the complaints against the tariff 
of Great Britain, as some of us think it is true in reference to 
the murmurs against our own American tariff, that "all the tears 
which should water this sorrow, live in an onion! " 

Cross over to the continent. What is the great fact of the 
day in that ([uarter ? Lo, a convention of delegates from ten of 
the independent States of Germany, forgetting their old political 



THE INFLUENCE OF COMMERCE. . 5T 

rivalries and social feuds, flinging to the winds all the fears and 
jealousies which have so long sown dragon's teeth along the 
borders of neighboring States of disproportioned strength and 
different forms of government, — the lamb lying down with the 
lion, — the little city of Frankfort with the proud kingdom of 
Prussia, — and all entering into a solemn league to regulate com- 
merce and secure markets ! What occupies the thoughts of the 
diplomatists, the Guizots, and Aberdeens, and Metternichs ? 
Reciprocal treaties of commerce and navigation ; — treaties to 
advance an honest trade, or sometimes (I thank Heaven!) to 
abolish an infamous and accursed traffic; — these are the engross- 
ing topics of their protocols and ultimatums. Even wars, when 
they have occurred, or when they have been rumored, for a quar- 
ter of a century past, how almost uniformly has the real motive, 
whether of the menace or of the hostile act, proved to be — what- 
ever may have been the pretence — not, as aforetime, to destroy, 
but to secure, the sources of commercial wealth. Algiers, AfF- 
ghanistan, China, Texas, Oregon, all point more or less directly, 
to one and the same pervading policy throughout the world, — 
the policy of opening new markets, securing new ports, and 
extending commerce and navigation over new lands and new 
seas. 

But, Mr. President, the most signal and most gratifying illus- 
tration of the predominating influence of commerce in the afi'airs 
of the world, is to be drawn not from the consideration of wars, 
but of peace. It is a common form of remark, that the pro- 
tracted and general peace, which the world has of late enjoyed, 
has been the cause of that vast extension of commerce which is 
everywhere witnessed. And doubtless, there is much truth in 
the idea intended to be conveyed by it. Certainly, too, there 
has been, and always will be, much of action and reaction in 
these coinciding circumstances, and much to account for various 
readings in the assignment of cause and consequence. Yet I 
cannot but think that the time has at length fully come, when 
the mode of stating the relations between these great interests, 
should be changed ; and when Commerce may fairly be consi- 
dered as having substantiated its claim to that highest of all 
titles, the great Conservator of the tvorWs peace, instead of being 



58 THE INFLUENCE OF COMMERCE. 

represented as a helpless dependent on peace for the liberty of 
prosecuting its own pursuits. 

Indeed, Commerce has, in all ages, been the most formidable 
antagonist of war. That great struggle for the mastery, which 
has been going on, almost from the earliest syllable of recorded 
time, upon the theatre of human life, and which has been vari- 
ously described and denominated, according to the aspect in 
which it has been regarded, or the object with which it was dis- 
cussed now as a struggle between aristocracy and democracy, 

and now as between the few and the many — has been little 
more than a struggle between the mercantile and the martial 

spirit. 

For centuries, and cycles of centuries, the martial spirit has 
prevailed. The written history of the world is one long bloody 
record of its triumph. And it cannot have escaped any one, 
that, during the periods of its sternest struggles, it has singled 
out the commercial spirit as its most formidable foe. Look at 
ancient Sparta, for example ; the state which, more than any 
other, was organized upon a purely war principle; though, to 
the credit of its founder be it spoken, with the view of defend- 
ing its own territories, and not of encroaching upon the domi- 
nions of others. What was the first great stroke of policy 
adopted by the Lacedaemonian lawgiver to secure the supre- 
macy of the martial spirit ? What did he primarily aim to ac- 
complish by his extraordinary enactments in relation to food, 
currency, education, honesty, and labor of all sorts ? A Lace- 
daemonian happening to be at Athens when the court was sit- 
ting, was informed of a man who had just been fined for idle- 
ness. " Let me see the person," exclaimed he, " who has been 
condemned for keeping up his dignity!^'' What was the philo- 
sophy of the black broth, the iron money, the consummate vir- 
tue of successful theft, the sublime dignity of idleness? It was 
the war system, entrenching itself, where alone it could be safe, 
on the ruins of commerce! The annihilation of trade, and all 
its inducements, and all its incidents, — the extermination of the 
mercantile spirit, root and branch, — this was the only mode 
whicii the sagacious Lycurgus could devise for maintaining the 
martial character of Sparta. 



THE INFLUENCE OF COMMERCE. 69 

Plato, who knew something of the practical value of com- 
merce, if it be true that it was by selling oil in Egypt, that he 
was enabled to defray the expenses of those travels and studies, 
by which he prepared himself to be one of the great lights of 
the world, bore witness to the wise adaptation of this policy to 
the end to be accomplished, when he declared that in a well- 
regulated commonwealth, the citizens should not engage in 
commerce, because they would be accustomed to find pretexts 
for justifying conduct so inconsistent with what was manly and 
becoming, as would relax the strictness of the military spirit; 
adding, that it had been better for the Athenians to have con- 
tinued to send annually the sons of seven of their principal 
citizens to be devoured by the Minotaur, than to have changed 
their ancient manners, and become a maritime power. 

It is this irreconcilable hostility between the mercantile and 
the martial spirit, which has led heroes, in all ages, to despise 
and deride the pursuits of trade, — from the heroes of the Ho- 
meric age of ancient Greece, with whom a pirate is said to 
have been a more respected character than a merchant, to him 
of modern France, who could find no severer sarcasm for his 
most hated foes, than to call them "a nation of shopkeepers." 

The madman of Macedonia, as he is sometimes called, but 
to whom, by one having occasion for military talents, might 
well have been applied the remark of George the Second, in 
reference to General Wolfe, that he wished, if Wolfe were mad, 
he could have bitten some of the rest of his generals, — after he 
had overrun almost the whole habitable earth, did indeed, in 
despair of finding any more dominions on the land to conquer, 
turn to the sea, to obtain fresh opportunity for gratifying his 
insatiate ambition. He projected a voyage for his fleet, from 
the Indus to the mouth of the Euphrates. Commercial views 
are sometimes regarded as having mingled with the ambition 
which prompted this undertaking. It has been called the first 
event of general importance to mankind in the history of com- 
merce and navigation, and has been thought worthy of being 
commemorated on the page of its learned historian, by a me- 
dallion, on which the head of its heroic projector is illuminated 
by the proud inscription, " aperiam terras gentibus.^^ 



CO THE IXFLUENCE OF COMMERCE. 

Let US transport ourselves, Gentlemen, for an instant, to a 
region recently rendered familiar by the events of Affghanistan 
and Scinde, and, turning back the page of history for a little 
more than two thousand years, catch a glimpse of the character 
and circumstances of this memorable voyage. 

Alexander, it seems, is at first sorely puzzled to find any one 
willing to assume the hazardous dignity of leading such an 
expedition. At length, Nearchus, a Cretan, is pressed into the 
service, and is duly installed as admiral of the fleet. Two thou- 
sand transports, and eighty galleys, of thirty oars each, are labo- 
riously fitted out, and the hero accompanies them in person, 
in a perilous passage, down the Indus to the ocean. He ap- 
proaches the mighty element not in that mood of antic and 
insolent presumption, which other madmen before and since 
have displayed on similar occasions. He throws no chains 
upon it, as Xerxes is narrated to have done, a century and a 
half earlier. He orders no host of spearmen to charge upon it, 
as Caligula did, three or four centuries afterwards. He does 
not even venture to try the effect of his imperial voice, in hush- 
ing its stormy billows, and bidding its proud waves to stay 
themselves at his feet, as Canute did, still a thousand years later. 
On the contrary, he humbles himself before its sublime presence, 
— he offers splendid sacrifices, and pours out rich libations to 
its divinities, and puts up fervent prayers for the success and 
safety of his fleet. 

Nearchus is then directed to wait two months for a favorable 
monsoon. But a revolt of certain savage tribes in the neighbor- 
hood, compels him to anticipate its arrival, and he embarks and 
enters upon his voyage. At the end of six days, two of which, 
however, were passed at anchor, the fleet had advanced rather 
more than nine miles I After digging away a bar at the mouth 
of the Indus, a little more progress is made, and a sandy Island 
reached, on which all hands are indulged with a day's rest. 
Again the anchors are weighed, but soon again the violence 
of the winds suspends all operations; the whole host are a 
second time landed,' and remain upon shore for four-and-twenty 
days. Once more the voyage is renewed ; but once more the 
winds rage furiously ; two of the galleys and a transport are 



THE INFLUENCE OF COMMERCE. Gl 

sunk in the gale, and their crews are seen swimming for their 
lives. A third time all hands disembark and fortify a camp. 
The long-expected monsoon at length sets in, and they start 
afresh, and with such accelerated speed, as to accomplish thirty- 
one miles in the first twenty-four hours. But then, a four days' 
battle with the natives, far more than counterbalances this 
unlooked-for speed. Soon after, however, a pilot is fallen in 
with, who engages to conduct them to the Persian Gulf. Under 
his auspices, they venture for the first time to sail by night, 
when they can have the benefit of the land breeze, and when 
the rowers, relieved from the heat of the sun, can exert them- 
selves to better advantage. And now they are making almost 
twice as many miles in the twenty-four hours as before, when 
lo! a new trouble arrests their course. Strange columns of water 
are seen thrown up into the air before them. The explanation 
of the pilot, that they are but the sportful spoutings of a huge 
fish, only adds to their alarm. If such be his sport, what must 
his wrath be? All hands drop their oars in a panic! The 
admiral, however, exhorts them to dismiss their fears, and directs 
them, when a whale advances towards them, to bear down upon 
it bravely, and scare it from their path with shouts, and dashing 
of oars, and sounding of trumpets I The entrance of the Per- 
sian Gulf, a distance of about six hundred miles, is at length 
reached ; the first and most difficult stage of the enterprise is 
accomplished ; and the admiral, having hauled all his vessels 
ashore, and fortified them by a double intrenchment, proceeds 
to communicate the joyful tidings to his imperial master, who 
has kept along at no great distance from him on the coast, and 
they unite in offering the sacrifices of thanksgiving to Jupiter, 
Apollo, Hercules, Neptune, and I know not how many other 
deities of land, air, and ocean I 

Such, Mr. President, is a summary sketch of this first event 
of general importance to mankind in the history of navigation ; 
an event which, though its details may excite the laughter of a 
Nantucket or New Bedford whaleman, or even of a Marblehead 
or Barnstable sailor boy, was counted among the gravest and 
grandest exploits of that unrivalled hero of antiquity, who took 
Achilles for his model, and who could not sleep without Aristotle's 

6 



62 THE INFLUENCE OF COMMERCE. 

copy of the Iliad under his pillow. If any commercial views 
are justly ascribed to the projector of such an expedition, it 
furnishes an early and striking illustration of the idea, which the 
general current of history has since confirmed, that the mercan- 
tile and martial spirits were never to be the subjects of recon- 
ciliation and compromise, nor commerce destined to be seen 
yoked to the car, and decorating the triumph of military ambi- 
tion. At all events, it supplies an amusing picture of the navi- 
gation of those early days, and shows how poorly provided and 
appointed was the mercantile spirit of antiquity for its great 
mission of civilization and peace. Transports and triaconters, 
skimming along the coast without a compass, and propelled by 
oarsmen who were panic-stricken at the spouting of a whale, 
were not the enginery by which commerce was to achieve its 
world-wide triumphs. And it was another Admiral than Near- 
chus, not yielding himself reluctantly to the call of an imperious 
sovereign, but prompted by the heroic impulses of his own 
breast, and offering up his prayers and oblations at another 
shrine than that of Jupiter or Neptune, who, in a still far distant 
age, was to open the world to the nations, give the commercial 
spirit sea-room, and lend the original impulse to those great 
movements of navigation and trade by which the whole face of 
society has been transformed. 

Well might the mail-clad monarchs of the earth refuse their 
countenance to Columbus, and reward his matchless exploit 
with beggary and chains. He projected, he accomplished that, 
which, in its ultimate and inevitable consequences, was to wrest 
from their hands the implements of their ferocious sport, — to 
break their bow and knap their spear in sunder, and all but to 
extinguish the source of their proudest and most absolute prero- 
gative. 

" No kingly conqueror, since time began 
The long career of ages, hatli to man 
A scope so ample given for Trade's bold range, 
Or caused on earth's wide stage such rapid, mighty change." 

From the discovery of the New World, the mercantile spirit has 
been rapidly gaining upon its old antagonist; and the establish- 



THE INFLUENCE OF COMMERCE. 63 

ment upon these shores of our own Republic, whose Union was 
the immediate result of commercial necessities, whose Independ- 
ence found its original impulse in commercial oppressions, and 
of whose Constitution the regulation of commerce was the first 
leading idea, may be regarded as the epoch at which the mar- 
tial spirit finally lost a supremacy which, it is believed and 
trusted, it can never again acquire. 

Yes, Mr. President, it is Commerce which is fast exorcising 
the fell spirit of war from nations which it has so long been 
tearing and rending. The merchant may, indeed, almost be seen 
at this moment summoning the rulers of the earth to his count- 
ing desk, and putting them under bonds to keep the peace! 
Upon what do we ourselves rely, to counteract the influence of 
the close approximation of yonder flaming planet to our sphere ? 
Let me rather say, (for it is not in our stars, but in ourselves, 
that we are to look for the causes which have brought the appre- 
hensions of war once more home to our hearts,) upon what do 
we rely, to save us from the bloody arbitrement of questions of 
mere territory and boundary, into which our own arbitrary and 
ambitious views would plunge us ? To what do we look to 
prevent a protracted strife with Mexico, if not to arrest even the 
outbreak of hostilities, but to the unwillingness of the great 
commercial powers, that the trade of the West Indies and of the 
Gulf should be interrupted ? Why is it so confidently pro- 
nounced, that Great Britain will never go to war with the United 
States for Oregon? Why, but that trade has created such a 
Siamese ligament between the two countries, that every blow 
which England could inflict upon us, would be but as a blow of 
the right arm upon the left. Why, but that in the smoke-pipe 
of every steamer which brings her merchandise to our ports, we 
see a calumet of Peace, which her war-chiefs dare not extinguish. 
Commerce, has, indeed, almost realized ideas which the poet, 
in his wildest fancies, assumed as the very standard of impos- 
sibility. We may not "charm ache with air, or agony with 
words;" but may we not "fetter strong madness with a cotton 
thread ? " Yes, that little fibre, which was not known as a 
product of the North American soil, when our old colonial 
union with Great Britain was dissolved, has already been spun 



64 THE IXFLUEITCE OF COMMERCE. 

by the ocean-moved power-loom of international commerce, 
into a thread which may fetter forever the strong madness of 
war. 

Yet let us not, — let us not experiment upon its tension too far. 
Neither the influences of Commerce, nor any other influences, 
have yet brought about the day, (if indeed such a day is ever to 
be enjoyed before the second coming of the Prince of Peace,) 
when we may regard all danger of war at an end, and w^hen we 
may fearlessly sport with the firebrands which have heretofore 
kindled it, or throw down the firearms by which we have been 
accustomed to defend ourselves against it. Preparation, I will 
not say, /or war, but against war, is still the dictate of common 
prudence. And while I would always contend first, for that 
preparation of an honest, equitable, inoffensive, and unaggressive 
policy towards all other nations, which would secure us, in every 
event, the triple armor of a just cause, I am not ready to aban- 
don those other preparations for which our constitution and laws 
have made provision. Nor do I justify such preparations only 
on any naiTow views of state necessity and worldly policy. I 
know no policy, as a statesman, which I may not pursue as a 
Christian. I can advocate no system before men, which I may 
not justify to my own conscience, or which I shrink from holding 
up in humble trust before my God. 

This is not the time or the place, however, for discussing the 
policy or the principle of military defences. I have only alluded 
to the subject, lest, in paying a heartfelt tribute to the pacific 
influences of commerce, I might seem to sympathize with views 
which would call upon Congress, at their coming session, to dis- 
band our army and militia, and dismantle our fortifications and 
ships of war, while Mexico is still mustering her forces upon 
the Rio Grande ; while England may be concentrating her 
fleets upon the Columbia ; and while Cherokees, and Seminoles, 
and Camanchcs, burning with hereditary hatred, and smarting 
under immediate wrongs, are ready to pounce upon the power-' 
less wherever they can find them. 

I honor the advocates of peace wherever they may be found ; 
and gladly would I hail the day, when their transcendent princi- 
ples shall be consistent with the maintenance of those organized 



THE INFLUENCE OF COMMERCE. 65 

societies which are so clearly of Divine original and sanction ; 
the day, when 

" All crimes shall cease, and ancient fraud shall fail, 
Eeturning Justice lift aloft her scale ; 
Peace o'er the world her olive wand extend, 
And white-rob'd Innocence from Heaven descend." 

In the mean time, let us rejoice that the great interests of in- 
ternational commerce are effecting practically, what these sublime 
principles aim at theoretically. It is easy, I know, to deride 
these interests as sordid, selfish, dollar-and-cent influences, ema- 
nating from the pocket, instead of from the heart or the con- 
science. But an enlightened and regulated pursuit of real inte- 
rests, is no unworthy policy, either on the part of individuals or 
nations, and a far-sighted selfishness is not only consistent with, 
but is often itself, the truest philanthropy. Commandments of 
not inferior authority to the Decalogue, teach us, that the love of 
our neighbor, a duty second only in obligation to the love of God, 
is to find its measure in that love of self, which has been im- 
planted in our nature for no unwise or unwarrantable ends. Yet, 
Gentlemen, w^hile I would vindicate the commercial spirit from 
the reproaches which are too often cast upon it, and hail its tri- 
umphant progress over the world as the harbinger of freedom, 
civilization, and peace, I would by no means intimate an opi- 
nion, that it is not itself susceptible of improvement, — that it 
does not itself demand regulation and restraint. The bigotry of 
the ancient Canonists regarded trade as inconsistent with Christ- 
ianity, and the Council of Melfi, under Pope Urban the Second, 
decreed that it was impossible to exercise any traffic, or even to 
follow the profession of the law, with a safe conscience. God 
forbid, that while we scoff at the doctrine which would excom- 
municate commerce from the pale of Christianity, we should 
embrace the far more fatal doctrine, which should regard the prin- 
ciples of Christianity as having no place, and no authority in 
the pursuits of commerce 1 The commercial spirit has rendered 
noble service to mankind. Its influence in promoting domestic 
order, in stimulating individual industry, in establishing and 
developing the great principle of the division of labor ; its ap- 



r 



QQ THE INFLUENCE OF COMMERCE. 

propriation of the surplus products of all mechanical and all 
agricultural industry for its cargoes ; its demand upon the high- 
est exercise of invention and skill for its vehicles; its appeal to 
the sublimest science for its guidance over the deep ; its impe- 
rative requisition of the strictest public faith and private inte- 
grity ; its indirect, but not less powerful operation in diffusing 
knowledge, civilization, and freedom over the world; — all con- 
spire with that noble conquest over the spirit of war which I 
have described, in commending it to the gratitude of man, and 
in stamping it with the crown-mark of a divinely appointed 
instrument for good. As long as the existing state of humanity 
is unchanged, as long as man is bound to man by wants and 
weaknesses and mutual dependencies, the voice which would 
cast out this spirit, will come from the cloistered cells of super- 
stition, and not from the temples of a true religion. But that it 
equires to be tempered, and chastened, and refined, and elevated, 
and purified, and Christianized, examples gross as earth and 
glaring as the sun, exhort us on every side. 

Commerce diffuses knowledge ; but there is a knowledge of 
evil as well as of good. Commerce spreads civilization; but 
civilization has its vices as well as its virtues. And is there not 
too much ground for the charge, that most of the trade with the 
savage tribes the world over, is carried on in a manner and by 
means calculated only to corrupt and degrade them, and even 
where it makes nominal proselytes to Christianity, to make them 
tenfold more the children of perdition than before ? I look to 
the influence of associations like that before me, to aid in arrest- 
ing this abuse, by elevating the views of those who are prepar- 
ing to engage in mercantile business, above the mere pursuit of 
gain ; and by impressing upon their hearts, while they are still 
open to impression, a deeper sense of responsibility for the con- 
duct of civiHzed man, in those relations towards these ignorant 
and wretched beings which commercial intercourse creates. It 
cannot fail to have given joy to every benevolent bosom, to find 
the historian of the late Exploring Expedition, bearing such 
unqualified testimony to the character and services of the Ame- 
rican Missionaries in the various savage islands which he visited ; 
and it may be hoped, that the day is not far distant, when the 



THE INFLUENCE OF COMMERCE. 67 

American merchant will be found everywhere cooperating in 
the noble efforts by which the triumphs of the Cross are yet to 
encircle the earth ! 

There is another stain upon the commercial spirit, of even 
deeper dye. I need not, in this presence, do more than name 
the African slave trade. Gentlemen, this flagitious traffic is 
still extensively prosecuted. Recent debates in the British 
Parliament would seem to show that it has of late been largely 
on the increase ; and that the number of slaves now annually 
taken from the coast of Africa, is more than twice as great as it 
was at the commencement of the present century. Recent 
developments at Brazil, too, would seem to implicate our own 
American commerce, and even our own New England shipping, 
in " the deep damnation of this taking off." It is, certainly, 
quite too well understood, that American vessels, sailing under 
the American flag, are the favorite vehicles of the slave trader. 
No force of language, no array of epithets, can add to the sense 
of shame and humiliation which the simplest statement of 
such facts must excite in every true American heart. 

Gentlemen, we naturally look to the organized forces of our 
National Government to suppress these abuses of our shipping 
and our flag, and we all rejoice in the recent negotiation of a 
treaty, in the highest degree honorable to our great Massachu- 
setts statesman, by which their suppression will be facilitated. 
But neither the combined navies of Great Britain and the 
United States, nor of the world, can accomplish this work with- 
out other aid. The cooperation of commercial men ; the gene- 
ral combination and conspiracy.^ if I may so speak, of all who go 
down to the sea in ships, or are in any degree connected with 
business on the great waters, — the merchants and merchants' 
clerks, the consignors and consignees, the captains, the super- 
cargoes, the mates, and the common sailors alike ; — these must 
come in aid of our armed squadrons, or the slave trade will still 
leave a stain upon commerce, which " not all great Neptune's 
ocean will wash clean," but which will rather " the multitudi- 
nous seas incarnadine ! " If a New England or an American 
vessel be concerned in that traffic, there should be at least no 
Boston breast, and no Massachusetts breast, capable of contain- 



08 THE INFLUENCE OF COMMERCE. 

ing the guilty secret. The commercial character, the moral 
character, of our City and of our Commonwealth should be vin- 
dicated on such an occasion, as they were just two hundred 
years ago, when one Thomas Keyser and one James Smith, 
(the latter a member of the church of Boston,) first involved 
these colonies in the iniquity of participating in the slave trade ; 
and when, under the lead of Richard Saltonstall, (the ancestor 
of the late honored and lamented Leverett Saltonstall,) a cry 
was raised against them as malefactors and murderers ; — a cry 
which could not be hushed, until the culprits had been " laid 
hold on," and their wretched victims wrested from their clutches 
and remitted to their native shore. I charge you, young men, 
to commit yourselves early to this cause, and to make it a prin- 
ciple of your association, not merely that you will never parti- 
cipate directly or indirectly in such an ignominious traffic, — 
but that you will omit no opportunity which either any effort or 
any accident in after life may afford you, of exposing any one 
who may be concerned in it, to the public scorn and legal chas- 
tisement which he so richly merits. 

Mr. President and Gentlemen, I may detain you and this dis- 
tinguished audience no longer. I have endeavored to say some- 
thing which should impress you with a deeper sense of the 
dignity of the profession which you have chosen, and of the 
duties and responsibilities which belong to it. I have desired, 
also, to suggest some views which should impress upon^ the 
community a just sense of the value of your institution, and of 
the importance of sustaining and encouraging it. May your 
brightest prospects be realized, and your best hopes fulfilled. 
May the liberality of your patrons and friends soon supply you 
with a Hall of your own, arranged with every reasonable refer- 
ence to your accommodation in pursuing the preparation for 
which you are associated. Let it be supplied with a Library, 
which shall leave you nothing to desire in the way of useful 
knowledge or profitable entertainment. Let it be adorned, from 
time to time, with the portraits of those whose examples are 
worthy of your imitation ; the Merchant-Patriots, who have 
written their own names upon the title-deeds of our Liberty : 



THE INFLUENCE OP COMMERCE. 69 

and the Merchant-Philanthropists, whose names have been 
inscribed, by a grateful community, on the institutions by which 
that liberty is best supported and most worthily illustrated. Let 
it be dedicated to the cause of Freedom, Civilization, and Peace. 
But let each one who enjoys its opportunities and privileges 
remember, that halls, and libraries, and decorations, and dedica- 
tions, are no substitute for his own individual efforts. Let him 
remember, that he has chosen a vocation which, in its highest 
branches, is a Science, with principles worthy of the deepest and 
most devoted study ; and which, in all its branches, will reward 
the best preparation both of the intellect and of the heart. And 
may you all be inspired with the ambition, of securing for our 
own country and for our own city, so far as in you lies, some 
share in that noble tribute which w^as paid by the celebrated 
Montesquieu, a century ago, to the land of our Fathers: — 
" They know (said he, speaking of the people of England) bet- 
ter than any other people upon earth, how to value, at the same 
time, these three great advantages, Religion, Commerce, and 
Liberty I " 



-/o 



7 



NATIONAL MONUMENT TO WASHINGTON. 

AN ORATION DELIVERED AT THE SEAT OE GOA'ERNMENT, OX THE OCCASION 
OF LAYING THE CORNER-STONE OF THE NATIONAL MONUMENT TO WASH- 
INGTON, JULY 4, 1S48. 



Fellow-Citizens or the United States, — 

We are assembled to take the first step towards the fulfilment 
of a long-deferred obligation. In this eight-and-fortieth year 
since his death, we have come together to lay the corner-stone 
of a National Monmnent to Washington. 

Other monuments to this illustrious person have long ago been 
erected. By not a few of the great States of our Union, by not 
a few of the great cities of our States, the chiselled statue or the 
lofty column has been set up in his honor. The highest art of 
the Old World, — of France, of Italy, and of England, succes- 
sively, — has been put in requisition for the purpose. Houdon 
for Virginia, Canova for North Carolina, Sir Francis Chantrey 
for Massachusetts, have severally signalized their genius by por- 
traying and perpetuating the form and features of the Father of 
his Country. 

Nor has the Congi-ess of the nation altogether failed of its 
duty in this respect. The massive and majestic figure which 
presides over the precincts of the Capitol, and which seems almost 
in the act of challenging a new vow of allegiance to the Consti- 
tution and the Union from every one who approaches it, is a 
visible testimony, — and one not the less grateful to an American 
eye, as being the masterly production of a native artist, * — that 

* Horatio Greenough. 



tr 



NATIOXAL MOXUJIEXT TO WASHINGTON. 71 

the government of the country has not been unmindful of what 
it owes to Washingtox. 

HOne tribute to his memory is left to be rendered. One monu- 
ment remains to be reared. A monument which shall bespeak 
the gratitude, not of States, or of cities, or of governments ; not 
of separate communities, or of official bodies ; but of the peo- 
ple, the whole people of the nation ; — a National Monument, 
erected by the citizens of the United States of America. ^^ 

Of such a monument we have come to lay the corner-stone 
here and now. On this day, on this spot, in this presence, and 
at this precise epoch in the history of our country and of the 
world, we are about to commence this crowning work of com- 
memoration. 

The day, the place, the witnesses, the period in the world's 
history and in our own history — all, all are most appropriate to 
the occasion. 

The day is appropriate. On this 4th day of July — emphati- 
cally the people's day — we come most fitly to acknowledge the 
people's debt to their first and greatest benefactor. 

Washington, indeed, had no immediate connection with the 
immortal act of the 4th of July, 1776. His signature did not 
attest the Declaration of Independence. But the sword by 
which that independence was to be achieved, was already at his 
side, and already had he struck the blow which rendered that 
declaration inevitable. 

^'■Hostibus primo fugaiis, Bostonmm recnperatmn" is the in- 
scription on the medal which commemorates Washington's ear- 
liest triumph. And when the British forces were compelled to 
evacuate Boston, on the 17th day of March, 1776, bloodless 
though the victory was, the question was irrevocably settled, 
that Independence, and not the mere redress of grievances, was 
to be the momentous stake of our colonial struggle. 

Without the event of the 4th of July, it is true, Washington 
would have found no adequate opening for that full career of 
military and civil glory which has rendered him illustrious for- 
ever. But it is equally true, that without Washington, this day 
could never have acquu-ed that renown in the history of human 
liberty, which now, above all other days, it enjoys. We may 



72 Nj^TIOXAL MONUMENT TO WASHINGTON. 

not say that the man made the day, or the day the man ; but 
we may say that, by the blessing of God, they were made for 
each other, and both for the highest and most enduring good of 
America and of the world. 
J/' iUtC "^^^^ P^^^® ^"^ appropriate. We are on the banks of his own 
'' beloved and beautiful Potomac. On one side of us, within a 

few hours' sail, are the hallowed scenes amid which Washington 
spent all of his mature life, which was not devoted to the public 
service of the country, and where still repose, in their original 
resting-place, all that remained of him when life was over. On 
the other side, and within our more immediate view, is the 
Capitol of the Republic, standing on the site selected by himself, 
and within whose walls the rights which he vindicated, the prin- 
ciples which he established, the institutions which he founded, 
have been, and are still to be, maintained, developed, and ad. 
vanced. 

The witnesses are appropriate, and such as eminently befit the 
occasion. 

The President of the United States is here ; and feels, I am 
persuaded, that the official distinction which he lends to the 
scene has no higher personal charm, if any higher public dignity, 
than that which it derives from its associations with his earliest 
and most illustrious predecessor. " I hold the place which 
Washington held," must be a reflection capable of sustaining a 
Chief ]\Iagisti-ate under any and every weight of responsibility 
and care, and of elevating him to the pursuit of the purest and 
loftiest ends. 

Representatives of foreign nations are here ; ready to bear wit- 
ness to the priceless example which America has given to the 
world, in the character of him, whose fame has long since ceased 
> to be the property of any country or of any age. 

The Vice-President and Senate ; the Heads of Departments ; 
the Judiciary; the Authorities of the City and District; the 
oillcers of the army and navy and marines, from many a field 
' and many a flood of earher and of later fame ; veterans of the 
line and volunteers, fresh from the scenes of trial and of triumph, 
with swords already wreathed with myrtles, which every patriot 
prays may prove as unfading as the laurels with which their 



NATIONAL MONUMENT TO "WASHINGTON. 73 

brows are bound ; — all are here ; eager to attest their reverence for 
the memory of one, whom statesmen and soldiers have con- 
spired in pronouncing to have been first alike in peace and in 
war. 

The Representatives of the People are here ; and it is only as 
their organ that I have felt it incumbent on me, in the midst of 
cares and duties which would have formed an ample apology 
for declining any other service, to say a few words on this occa- 
sion. Coming here in no official capacity, I yet feel that I bring 
with me the sanction not merely of the representatives of the 
people, but of the people themselves, for all that I can say, and 
for much more than I can say, in honor of Washington. 

And, indeed, the People themselves are here ; in masses such 
as never before were seen within the shadows of the Capitol, — 
a cloud of witnesses — to bring their own heartfelt testimony to 
the occasion. From all the States of the Union ; from all poli- 
tical parties ; from all professions and occupations ; men of all 
sorts and conditions, and those before whom men of all sorts and 
conditions bow, as lending the chief ornament and grace to every 
scene of life ; the People, — as individual citizens, and in every 
variety of association, military and masonic, moral, collegiate, 
and charitable, Rechabites and Red Men, Sons of Temperance 
and Firemen, United Brothers and Odd Fellows, — the People 
have come up this day to the temple gates of a common and 
glorious republic, to fraternize with each other in a fresh act of 
homage to the memory of the man, who was, and is, and will 
forever be, "first in the hearts of his countrymen I" Welcome, 
welcome, Americans all! "The name of American, which be- 
longs to you in your national capacity, (I borrow the words of 
Washington himself,) must always exalt the just pride of patri- 
otism more than any appellation derived from local discrimina- 
tions." 

Nor can I feel, fellow-citizens, that I have yet made mention 
of all who are with us at this hour. Which of us does not real- 
ize that unseen witnesses are around us ? Think ye, that the 
little band, whose feeble forms are spared to bless our sight once 
more, are all of the army of Washington, who are uniting with 
us in this tribute of reverence for his memory ? Think ye. that 
7 



74 NATIONAL MONUMENT TO WASHINGTON. 

the patriot soldiers or the patriot statesmen, who stood around 
him in war and in peace, are altogether absent from a scene like 
this? Adams and Jefferson, joint authors of the Declaration, 
by whose lives and deaths this day has been doubly hallowed ; 
Hamilton and Madison, joint framers of the Constitution, present, 
visibly present, in the venerated persons of those nearest and dear- 
estto them in life ; Marshall, under whose auspices the work before 
us was projected, and whose classic pen had already constructed a 
monument to his illustrious compeer and friend more durable 
than marble or granite; Knox, Lincoln, and Green; Franklin, 
Jay, Pickering, and Morris ; Schuyler and Putnam, Stark and 
Prescott, Sumter and Marion, Steuben, Kosciusko, and Lafay- 
ette ; companions, counsellors, supporters, friends, followers of 
Washington, all, all; — we hail them from their orbs on high, and 
feel that we do them no wrong in counting them among the 
gratified witnesses of this occasion ! 

But it is the precise epoch at which we have arrived in the 
world's history, and in our own history, which imparts to this 
occasion an interest and an importance which cannot easily be 
over-estimated. 

I can make but the merest allusion to the mighty movements 
which have recently taken place on the continent of Europe ; 
where events which would have given character to an age, have 
been crowded within the changes of a moon. 

Interesting, intensely interesting, as these events have been to 
all who have witnessed them, they have been tenfold more inte- 
resting to Americans. We see in them the influence of our own 
institutions. We behold in them the results of our own example. 
We recognize them as the spontaneous germination and growth 
of seeds which have been wafted over the ocean, for half a cen- 
tury past, from our own original Liberty Tree. 

The distinguished writer of the Declaration which made this 
day memorable, was full of apprehensions as to the influence of 
the Old World upon the New. He even wished, on one occa- 
sion, that "an ocean of fire" might roll between America and 
Europe, to cut off and consume those serpent fascinations and 
seductions which were to corrupt, if not to strangle outright, our 
infant freedom in its cradle. 



NATIONAL MONUMENT TO WASHINGTON. 75 

Doubtless, these were no idle fears at the time. Doubtless, 
there are dangers still, which might almost seem to have justified 
such a wish. But it is plain that the currents of political influ- 
ence thus far have run deepest and strongest in the opposite 
direction. The influence of the New World upon the Old is the 
great moral of the events of the day. 

Mr. Jefferson's " ocean of fire " has, indeed, been almost real- 
ized. A tremendous enginery has covered the sea with smoke 
and flame. The fiery dragon has ceased to be a fable. The in- 
spired description of Leviathan is fulfilled to the letter. " Out 
of his mouth go burning lamps, and sparks of fire leap out. 
Out of his nostrils goeth smoke, as out of a seething-pot or 
caldron. His breath kindleth coals, and a flame goeth out of his 
mouth. He maketh the deep to boil like a pot ; he maketh the 
sea like a pot of ointment." 

But the Saint George of modern civilization and science, in- 
stead of slaying the dragon, has subdued him to the yoke, and 
broken him in to the service of mankind. The ocean of fire has 
only facilitated the intercourse which it was invoked to destroy. 
And the result is before the world. 

New modes of communication, regular and more rapid inter- 
changes of information and opinion, freer and more frequent 
comparisons of principles, of institutions, and of conditions, 
have at length brought the political systems of the two conti- 
nents into conflict ; and prostrate thrones and reeling empires 
this day bear witness to the shock ! 

Yes, fellow-citizens, (if I may be aUowed the figure,) the great 
upward and downward trains on the track of human freedom 
have at last come into collision ! It is too early as yet for any 
one to pronounce upon the precise consequences of the encounter. 
But we can see at a glance what engines have been shattered, 
and what engineers have been dashed from their seats. We can 
see, too, that the great American built locomotive, " Liberty," 
still holds on its course, unimpeded and unimpaired ; gathering 
strength as it goes ; developing new energies to meet new 
exigencies ; and bearing along its imperial train of twenty mil- 
lions of people with a speed which knows no parallel. 

Nor can we fail to observe that men are everywhere beginning 



76 NATIONAL MONUMENT TO WASHINGTON. 

to examine the model of this mighty engine, and that not a few- 
have aheady begun to copy its construction and to imitate its 
machinery. The great docti-ines of our own Revolution, that 
" all men are created equal ; that they are endowed by their 
Creator with certain inalienable rights ; that among these are 
life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness ; that to secure these 
rights governments are instituted among men, deriving their just 
powers from the consent of the governed ; that whenever any 
form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the 
right of the people to alter or to abolish it and to institute a new 
government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organ- 
izing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely 
to effect their safety and happiness ; " — these fundamental 
maxims of the rights of man are proclaimed as emphatically this 
day in Paris, as they were seventy-two years ago this day in 
Philadelphia. 
^^; And not in Paris alone. The whole civilized world resounds 

with American opinions and American principles. Every vale 
is vocal with them. Every mountain has found a tongue for 
dr^Vfc^Ai' them. 

Sonitum toto Germaniu coelo 



Audiit, et iusolitis tremuerunt motibus Alpes. 

Everywhere the people are heard calling their rulers to account 
and holding them to a just responsibility. Everywhere the cry 
is raised for the elective franchise, the trial by jury, the freedom 
of the press, written constitutions, representative systems, repub- 
lican forms. 

In some cases, most fortunately, the rulers' themselves have 
not escaped some seasonable symptoms of the pervading fervor 
for freedom, and have nobly anticipated the demands of their 
subjects. To the sovereign Pontiff of the Roman States, in 
particular, belongs the honor of having led the way in the great 
movement of the day, and no American will withhold from him 
a cordial tribute of respect and admiration for whatever he has 
done or designed for the regeneration of Italy. Glorious, in- 
deed, on the page of history will be the name of Pius IX., if 
the rise of another Rome shall be traced to his wise and liberal 



NATIONAL MONUMENT TO WASHINGTON. 77 

policy. Yet not less truly glorious, if his own authority should 
date its decline to his noble refusal to lend his apostolical sanc- 
tion to a war of conquest. 

For Italy, however, and for France, and for the whole Euro- 
pean world alike, a great work still remains. A rational, practi- 
cal, enduring liberty cannot be acquired in a paroxysm, cannot 
be established by a proclamation. It is not, — our own history 
proves that it is not, — 

" The hasty product of a day, 
But the well-ripened fruit of wise delay." 

The redress of a few crying grievances, the reform of a few 
glaring abuses, the banishment of a minister, the burning of a 
throne, the overthrow of a dynasty, these are but scanty prepa- 
rations for the mighty undertaking upon which they have en- 
tered. New systems are to be constructed; new forms to be 
established ; new governments to be instituted, organized, and 
administered, upon principles which shall reconcile the seeming 
conflict between liberty and law, and secure to every one the 
enjoyment of regulated constitutional freedom. 

And it is at this moment, fellow-citizens, when this vast labor 
is about to be commenced, when the files of the Old World are 
searched in vain for precedents, and the file-leaders of the Old 
World are looked to in vain for pioneers, and when all eyes are 
strained to find the men, to find the man, who is sufficient for 
these things, it is at such a moment that we are assembled on 
this pinnacle of the American Republic — I might almost say 
by some Divine impulse and direction — to hold up afresh to the 
admiration and imitation of mankind the character and example 
of George Washington. 

Let us contemplate that character and that example for a mo- 
ment, and see whether there be any thing in all the treasures of 
our country's fame, I do not say merely of equal intrinsic value, 
but of such eminent adaptation to the exigencies of the time 
and the immediate wants of the world. 

I will enter into no details of his personal history. Wash- 
ington's birthday is a National Festival, His whole life, boy- 
hood and manhood, has been learned by heart by us all. Who 

7* 



78 NATIONAL MONUMENT TO WASHINGTON. 

knows not that he was a self-made man ? Who knows not that 
the only education which he enjoyed was that of the common 
schools of Virginia, which, at that day, were of the very com- 
monest sort ? Who remembers not those extraordinary youth- 
ful adventures, by which he was trained up to the great work of 
his destiny ? Who remembers not the labors and exposures 
which he encountered as a land surveyor, at the early age of six- 
teen years ? Who has forgotten the perils of his journey of 
forty-one days and five hundred and sixty miles, from Wil- 
liamsburg to French Creek, when sent, at the age of only 
twenty-one, as commissioner from Governor Dinwiddle, to de- 
mand of the French forces their authority for invading the King's 
dominions ? Who has not followed him a hundred times, with 
breathless anxiety, as he threads his way through that pathless 
wilderness, at one moment fired at by Indians at fifteen paces, 
at the next wrecked upon a raft amid snow and ice, and sub- 
jected throughout to every danger, which treacherous elements 
or still more treacherous enemies could involve? Who has 
forgotten his hardly less miraculous escape, a few years later, on 
the banks of the Monongahela, when, foremost in that fearful 
fight, he was the only mounted officer of the British troops who 
was not either killed or desperately wounded ? 

Let me not speak of Washington as a merely self-made man. 
There were influences employed in moulding and making him, 
far, far above his own control. Bereft of his father at the tender 
age of eleven years, he had a mother left, to whom the world 
can never over-estimate its debt. And higher, holier still, was 
the guardianship so signally manifested in more than one event 
of his life. " By the all-powerful dispensations of Providence," 
wrote Washington himself to his venerated parent, after Brad- 
dock's defeat, " I have been protected beyond all human proba- 
bility or expectation ; for I had four bullets through my coat, 
and two horses shot under me ; yet I escaped unhurt, although 
death was levelling my companions on every side of me." Well 
did the eloquent pastor of a neighboring parish, on his return, 
"point out to the public that heroic youth. Colonel Washington, 
whom (says he) I cannot but hope Providence has hitherto pre- 
served in so signal a manner for some important service to the 
country." 



NATIONAL MONUMENT TO "WASHINGTON. 79 

And not less natural or less striking was the testimony of the 
Indian chief, who told Washington, fifteen years afterwards, 
" that at the battle of the Monongahela, he had singled him 
out as a conspicuous object, had fired his rifle at him many 
times, and directed his young warriors to do the same, but that, 
to his utter astonishment, none of their balls took effect ; that he 
was then persuaded that the youthful hero was under the special 
guardianship of the Great Spirit, and immediately ceased to 
fire at him ; and that he was now come to pay homage to the 
man who was the particular favorite of Heaven, and who could 
never die in battle." 

Our Revolutionary fathers had many causes for adoring the 
invisible hand by which they were guided and guarded in their 
great struggle for liberty ; but none, none stronger than this 
Providential preparation and preservation of their destined chief. 
Be it ours to prolong that anthem of gratitude which may no 
more be heard from their mute lips : " The grave cannot praise 
Thee; death cannot celebrate Thee; but the living, the living, 
they shall praise Thee, as we do this day I " 

Of the public services of Washington to our own country, 
for which he was thus prepared and preserved, it is enough to 
say, that in the three great epochs of our national history he 
stands forth preeminent and peerless, the master-spirit of the 
time. 

In the war of the Revolution, we see him the Leader of our 
Armies. 

In the formation of the Constitution, we see him the Presi- 
dent of our Councils. 

In the organization of the Federal Government, we see him 
the Chief Magistrate of our Republic. 

Indeed, from the memorable day when, under the unheard but 
by no means inauspicious salute of both British and American 
batteries, engaged in no holiday exercise on Bunker Hill, it was 
unanimously resolved, that George Washington having been 
chosen commander-in-chief of such forces as are or shall be 
raised for the maintenance and preservation of American liberty, 
" This Congress doth now declare that they will maintain and 
assist him, and adhere to him, the said George Washington, 



80 NATIONAL MONUMENT TO WASHINGTON. 

with their lives and fortunes in the same cause ; " from this 
ever-memorable 17th of June, 1775 — a day on which (as has 
been well said * ) Providence kept an even balance with the 
cause, and while it took from us a Warren gave us a Washing- 
ton — to the 14th day of December, 1799, when he died, we 
shall search the annals of our land in vain for any important 
scene, in which he was any thing less than the principal figure. 

It is, however, the character of Washington, and not the mere 
part which he played, which I would hold up this day to the 
world, as worthy of endless and universal commemoration. The 
highest official distinctions may be enjoyed, and the most im- 
portant public services rendered, by men whose lives will not 
endure examination. It is the glory of Washington, that the 
virtues of the man outshone even the brilliancy of his acts, and 
that the results which he accomplished were only the legitimate 
exemplifications of the principles which he professed and che- 
rished. 

In the whole history of the world it may be doubted whether 
any man can be found, who has exerted a more controlling 
influence over men and over events than George Washington. 
To what did he owe that influence? How did he win, how 
did he wield, that magic power, that majestic authority, over 
the minds and hearts of his countrymen and of mankind ? In 
what did the power of Washington consist ? 

It was not the power of vast learning or varied acquirements. 
He made no pretensions to scholarship, and had no opportunity 
for extensive reading. 

It was not the power of sparkling wit or glowing rhetoric. 
Though long associated with deliberative bodies, he never made 
a set speech in his life, nor ever mingled in a stormy debate. 

It was not the power of personal fascination. There was lit- 
tle about him of that gracious affability which sometimes lends 
such resistless attraction to men of commanding position. His 
august presence inspired more of awe than of affection, and his 
friends, numerous and devoted as they were, were bound to him 
rather by ties of respect than of love. 

* By Edward Everett. 



NATIONAL MONUMENT TO WASHINGTON. 81 

It was not the power of a daring and desperate spirit of heroic 
adventure. " If I ever said so," replied Washington, when 
asked whether he had said that there was something charming 
in the sound of a whistling bullet ; " if I ever said so, it was 
when I was young." He had no passion for mere exploits. He 
sought no bubble reputation in the cannon's mouth. With a 
courage never questioned, and equal to every exigency, he had 
yet " a wisdom which did guide his valor to act in safety." 

In what, then, did the power of Washington consist ? When 
Patrick Henry returned home from the first Continental Con- 
gress, and was asked who was the greatest man in that body, 
he replied : " If you speak of eloquence, Mr. Rutledge, of South 
Carolina, is the greatest orator; but if you speak of solid inform- ^^m^**; ' 
ation and sound judgment. Colonel Washington is by far the 
greatest man on that floor." 

When, fifteen years earlier, Washington, at the close of the 
French war, took his seat for the first time in the House of Bur- 
gesses of Virginia, and a vote of thanks was presented to him 
for his military services to the Colony, his hesitation- and embar- 
rassment were relieved by the Speaker, who said, " Sit down, 
Mr. Washington, your modesty equals your valor ; and that 
surpasses the power of any language that I possess." 

But it was not solid information, or sound judgment, or even 
that rare combination of surpassing modesty and valor, great as 
these qualities are, which gave Washington such a hold on the 
regard, respect, and confidence of the American people. I ha- ^^ 
zard nothing in saying that it was the high moral element of 
his character which imparted to it its preponderating force. -His ..M-)^^^ 
incorruptible honesty, his uncompromising truth, his devout 
reliance on God, the purity of his life, the scrupulousness of his 
conscience, the disinterestedness of his purposes, his humanity, 
generosity, and justice, — these were the ingredients which, 
blending harmoniously with solid information and sound judg- 
ment and a valor only equalled by his modesty, made up a 
character to which the world may be fearlessly challenged for a 
parallel. , ^i 

"Labor to keep alive in your breast that little spark of celes- 
tial fire, conscience^'' was one of a series of maxims which 



82 NATIONAL MONUMENT TO WASHINGTON. 

Washington framed or copied for his own use when a boy. 
His rigid adherence to principle, his steadfast discharge of duty, 
his utter abandonment of self, his unreserved devotion to what- 
ever interests were committed to his care, attest the more than 
Vestal vigilance with which he observed that maxim. He kept 
alive that spark. He made it shine before men. He kindled it 
into a flame which illumined his whole life. No occasion was 
so momentous, no circumstances were so minute, as to absolve 
him from following its guiding ray. The marginal explanation 
in his account book, in regard to the expenses of his wife's 
annual visit to the camp during the Revolutionary war, with his 
passing allusion to the " self-denial " which the exigencies of his 
country had cost him, furnishes a charming illustration of his 
habitual exactness. The fact that every barrel of flour which 
bore the brand of " George Washington, Mount Vernon," was 
exempted from the customary inspection in the West India 
ports, — that name being regarded as an ample guaranty of the 
quality and quantity of any article to which it was affixed, — 
supplies a not less striking proof that his exactness was every- 
where understood. 

Everybody saw that Washington sought nothing for himself. 
Everybody knew that he sacrificed nothing to personal or to 
party ends. Hence, the mighty influence, the matchless sway, 
which he exercised over all around him. " He was the only 
man in the United States who possessed the confidence of all, 
(said Thomas Jefferson ;) there was no other one who was con- 
sidered as any thing more than a party leader." 

Who ever thinks of Washington as a mere politician ? Who 
ever associates him with the petty arts and pitiful intrigues of 
partisan office-seekers or partisan office-holders ? Who ever 
pictures. him canvassing for votes, dealing out proscription, or 
dofing out patronage ? 

" No part of my duty," wrote Washington to Governor Bow- 
doin, in a letter, the still unpublished original of which is a 
precious inheritance of my own : " No part of my duty will be 
more delicate, and in many instances more unpleasant, than 
that of nominating and appointing persons to oflice. It will 
undoubtedly happen that there will be several candidates for 



NATIONAL MONUMENT TO WASHINGTON. 83 

the same office, whose pretensions, abilities, and integrity may 
be nearly equal, and who will come forward so equally sup- 
ported in every respect as almost to require the aid of super- 
natural intuition to fix upon the right. I shall, however, in all 
events, have the satisfaction to reflect that I entered upon my 
administration unconfined by a single engagement, uninfluenced 
by any ties of blood or friendship, and with the best intention 
and fullest determination to nominate to office those persons 
only who, upon every consideration, were the most deserving, 
and who would probably execute their several functions to the 
interest and credit of the American Union ; if such characters 
could be found by my exploring every avenue of information 
respecting their merits and pretensions that it was in my power 
to obtain." 

Aild there was as little of the vulgar hero about him, as there 
was of the mere politician. At the head of a victorious army, 
of which he was the idol, — an army too often provoked to the 
very verge of mutiny by the neglect of an inefficient Govern- 
ment, — we find him the constant counsellor of subordination 
and submission to the civil authority. With the sword of a 
conqueror at his side, we find him the unceasing advocate of 
peace. Repeatedly invested with more than the power of a 
Roman Dictator, we see him receiving that power with reluct- 
ance, employing it with the utmost moderation, and eagerly 
embracing the earliest opportunity to resign it. The offer of a 
crown could not, did not, tempt him for an instant from his 
allegiance to liberty.* He rejected it Avith indignation and 
abhorrence, and proceeded to devote all his energies and all his 
influence, all his popularity and all his ability, to the establish- 
ment of that Republican System, of which he was from first to 
last the uncompromising advocate, and with the ultimate success 
of which he believed the best interests of America and of the 
world were inseparably connected. 

It is thus that, in contemplating the character of Washington, 
the offices which he held, the acts which he performed, his suc- 
cesses as a statesman, his triumphs as a soldier, almost fade 

* Sparks's Life of Washington, pp. 354-5. 



84 NATIONAL MONUMENT TO WASHINGTON. 

from our sight. It is not the Washington of the Delaware or 
the Brandywine, of Germantown or of Monmouth ; it is not 
Washington, the President of the Convention, or the President 
of the Republic, which we admire. We cast our eyes over his 
life, not to be dazzled by the meteoric lustre of particular pas- 
sages, but to behold its whole pathway radiant, radiant every- 
where, with the true glory of a just, conscientious, consummate 
man I Of him we feel it to be no exaggeration to say that 

" All the ends he aimed at 
"Were his Country's, his God's, and Tnith's." 

Of him we feel it to be no exaggeration to say, that he stands 
upon the page of history the great modern illustration and 
example of that exquisite and Divine precept, which fell from 
the lips of the dying monarch of Israel, — 

" He that ruleth over men must be just, ruling in the fear of 
God; 

" And he shall be as the light of the morning when the sun 
riseth, even a morning without clouds ! " 

And now, fellow-citizens, it is this incomparable and tran- 
scendent character, which America, on this occasion, holds up 
afresh to the admiration of mankind. Believing it to be the 
only character which could have carried us safely through our 
own Revolutionary struggles, we present it, especially, this day, 
to the wistful gaze of convulsed and distracted Europe. May 
we not hope that there may be kindred spirits over the sea, upon 
whom the example may impress itself, till they shall be inflamed 
with a noble rage to follow it? Shall we not call upon them to 
turn from a vain reliance upon their old idols, and to behold 
here, in the mingled moderation and courage, in the combined 
piety and patriotism, in the blended virtue, principle, wisdom, 
valor, self-denial, and self-devotion of our Washington, the 
express image of the man, the only man, for their occasion ? 

Daphni, quid antiquos signorum suspicis ortus? 
Ecce Dionifi proccssit Ca-saris astrum ! 

Let us rejoice that our call is anticipated. Washington is no 



NATIONAL MONUMENT TO WASHINGTON. 85 

new name to Europe. His star has been seen in every sky, and 
wise men everywhere have done it homage. To what other 
merely human being, indeed, has such homage ever before or 
since been rendered ? 

" I have a large acquaintance among the most valuable and 
exalted classes of men," wrote Erskine to Washington him- 
self, " but you are the only being for whom I ever felt an awful 
reverence." 

" Illustrious man I " said Fox of him, in the British House of 
Commons in 1794, " deriving honor less from the splendor of his 
situation than from the dignity of his mind ; before whom all 
borrowed greatness sinks into insignificance, and all the poten- 
tates of Europe* become little and contemptible." 

" Washington is dead ! " proclaimed Napoleon, on hearing of 
the event. " This great man fought against tyranny; he esta- 
blished the liberty of his country. His memory will be always 
dear to the French people, as it will be to all free men of the 
two worlds." 

" It will be the duty of the historian and the sage in all ages," 
says Lord Brougham, " to let no occasion pass of commemorat- 
ing this illustrious man ; and, until time shall be no more, will 
a test of the progress which our race has made in wisdom and 
virtue be derived from the veneration paid to the immortal name 
of Washington." 

" One thing is certain," says Guizot — " one thing is certain ; 
that which Washington did — the founding of a free government 
by order and peace, at the close of the revolution — no other 
policy than his could have accomplished." 

And later, better still : " Efface henceforth the name of Machi- 
avel," said Lamartine, within a few weeks past, in his reply to 
the Italian association, — " efface henceforth the name of Machi- 
avel from your titles of glory, and substitute for it the name of 
Washington ; that is the one which should now be proclaimed ; 
that is the name of modern liberty. It is no longer the name 
of a politician or a conqueror that is required ; it is that of a 
man, the most disinterested, the most devoted to the people. 

* It was not thought necessary to disfigure the text, by inserting the loyal parenthesis, 
" (excepting the members of our own royal family.") 

8 



86 NATIONAL MONUMENT TO WASHINGTON. 

This is the man required by liberty. The want of the age is a 
European Washington I " 

And who shall supply that want but he who so vividly real- 
izes it? Enthusiastic, eloquent, admirable Lamartine I Though 
the magic wires may even now be trembling with the tidings of 
his downfall, we will not yet quite despair of him. Go on in 
the higii career to which you have been called I Fall in it, if it 
must be so; but fall not, falter not, from it! Imitate the cha- 
racter you have so nobly appreciated ! Fulfil the pledges you 
have so gloriously given I Plead still against the banner of 
blood ! Strive still against the reign of terror I Aim still 

" By winning words to conquer willing hearts, 
And make persuasion do the work of fear ! " 

May a gallant and generous people second you, and the Power 
which preserved Washington sustain you, until you have secured 
peace, order, freedom to your country I 

" Si qua fata aspera rumpas, 
Tu Marcellus eris." * 

But, fellow-citizens, while we thus commend the character 
and example of Washington to others, let us not forget to imi- 
tate it ourselves. I have spoken of the precise period which we 
have reached in our own history, as well as in that of the world 
at large, as giving something of peculiar interest to the proceed- 
ings in which we are engaged. I may not, I will not, disturb 
the harmony of the scene before me by the slightest allusion of 
a party character. The circumstances of the occasion forbid it; 
the associations of the day forbid it ; the character of him in 
Avhose honor we are assembled forbids it ; my own feelings 
revolt from it. But I may say, I must say, and every one within 
the sound of my voice will sustain me in saying, that there has 
been no moment since Washington himself was among us, 
when it was more important than at this moment, that the two 
great leading principles of his policy should be remembered and 
cherished. 

* These forebodings were but too soon fulfilled. The tidings of the downfoll of 
Lamartine's administration were received a few days after this Address was delivered. 



NATIONAL MONUMENT TO WASHINGTON. 87 

Those principles were, first, the most complete, cordial and 
indissoluble Union of the States ; and, second, the most entire 
separation and disentanglement of our own country from all 
other countries. Perfect union among ourselves, perfect neu- 
trality towards others, and peace, peace, — domestic peace and 
foreign peace, — as the result ; this was the chosen and consum- 
mate policy of the Father of his country. 

But above all, and before all, in the heart of Washington, 
was the Union of the States ; and no opportunity was ever 
omitted by him, to impress upon his fellow-citizens the profound 
sense which he entertained, of its vital importance at once to 
their prosperity and their liberty. 

In that incomparable Address in which he bade farewell to his 
countrymen at the close of his Presidential service, he touched 
upon many other topics with the earnestness of a sincere con- 
viction. He called upon them in solemn terms to " cherish 
public credit ; " to " observe good faith and justice towards all 
nations," avoiding both " inveterate antipathies, and passionate 
attachments " towards any ; to mitigate and assuage the un- 
quenchable fire of party spirit, " lest, instead of warming, it should 
consume ; " to abstain from " characterizing parties by geogra- 
phical distinctions ; " " to promote institutions for the general 
diffusion of knowledge ; " to respect and uphold " religion and 
morality, those great pillars of human happiness, those firmest 
props of the duties of men and of citizens." 

But what can exceed, what can equal, the accumulated inten- 
sity of thought and of expression with which he calls upon them 
to clins: to the Union of the States. " It is of infinite moment," 
says he, in language which we ought never to be weary of hear- 
ing or of repeating, " that you should properly estimate the im- 
mense value of your National Union to your collec^ve and 
individual happiness; that you should cherish a cordial, habit- 
ual, immovable attachment to it ; accustoming yourselves to 
think and speak of it as of the palladium of your political 
safety and prosperity ; watching for its preservation with jealous 
anxiety ; discountenancing whatever may suggest even a sus- 
picion that it can, in any event, be abandoned ; and indignantly 
frowning upon the first dawning of every attempt to alienate 



88 NATIONAL MONUMENT TO WASHINGTON. 

any portion of our country from the rest, or to enfeeble the 
sacred ties which now link together the various parts." 

The Union, the Union in any events was thus the sentiment of 
"Washington. The Union, the Union in any event, let it be our 
sentiment this day ! 
<^ Yes, to-day, fellow-citizens, at the very moment when the 
extension of our boundaries and the multiplication of our terri- 
tories are producing, directly and indirectly, among the different 
members of our political system, so many marked and mourned 
centrifugal tendencies, let us seize this occasion to renew to 
each other our vows of allegiance and devotion to the American 
Union, and let us recognize in our common title to the name 
and the fame of Washington, and in our common veneration 
for his example and his advice, the all-sufficient centripetal 
power, which shall hold the thick clustering stars of our con- 
federacy in one glorious constellation forever ! Let the column 
which we are about to construct, be at once a pledge and an 
emblem of perpetual union! Let the foundations be laid, let 
the superstructure be built up and cemented, let each stone be 
raised and riveted, in a spirit of national brotherhood ! And 
may the earliest ray of the rising sun, — till that sun shall set 
to rise no more, — draw forth from it daily, as from the fabled 
statue of antiquity, a strain of national harmony, which shall 
strike a responsive chord in every heart throughout the Re- 
! public I 

Proceed, then, fellow-citizens, with the \vork for which you 
have assembled ! Lay the corner-stone of a monument which 
shall adequately bespeak the gratitude of the whole American 
people to the illustrious Father of his country I Build it to 
the skies ; you cannot outreach the loftiness of his principles ! 
Found it upon the massive and eternal rock ; you cannot make 
it more enduring than his fame I Construct it of the peerless 
\ Parian marble; you cannot make it purer than his life ! Exhaust 
/ upon it the rules and principles of ancient and of modern art ; 
you cannot make it more proportionate than his character! 

But let not your homage to his memory end here. Think not 
to transfer to a tablet or a column, the tribute which is due from 
yourselves. Just honor to Washington can only be rendered by 



NATIONAL MONUMENT TO WASHINGTON. 89 

observing his precepts and imitating his example. Similitudine 
decoremus. * He has built his own monument. We, and those 
who come after us in successive generations, are its appointed, 
its privileged guardians. This wide-spread Republic is the true 
monument to Washington. Maintain its Independence. Up- 
hold its Constitution. Preserve its Union. Defend its Liberty. 
Let it stand before the world in all its original strength and 
beauty, securing peace, order, equality, and freedom to all within 
its boundaries, and shedding light, and hope, and joy, upon the 
pathway of human liberty throughout the world ; and Wash- 
ington needs no other monument. Other structures may fitly 
testify our veneration for him ; this^this alone, can adequately 
illustrate his services ta mankind. 

Nor does he need even this. The Republic may perish ; the 
wide arch of our ranged Union may fall ; star by star its glories 
may expire ; stone after stone its columns and its capitol may 
moulder and crumble; all other names which adorn its annals 
may be forgotten ; but as long as human hearts shall anywhere 
pant, or human tongues shall anywhere plead, for a true, rational, 
constitutional liberty, those hearts shall enshrine the memory, 
and those tongues shall prolong the fame, of George Wash- 
ington! 



* We may well add, with Tacitus, Si natura suppeditet 



8* 



THE 



LIFE AND SEEYICES OF JAMES BOWDOIN. 

AN ADDRESS DELIVERED BEFORE THE MAINE HISTORICAL SOCIETY, AT 
BOWDOIN COLLEGE, ON THE AFTERNOON OF THE ANNUAL COMMENCE- 
MENT, SEPTEMBER 5, 1S49. 



Me. Presidext and Gentlemen op the Maine Histokical Society, — 

I AM here, as you are aware, and as I trust this crowded and 
brilliant assembly is aware, for no purpose of literary discussion, 
philosophical speculation, or oratorical display. The character 
of the occasion would alone have pointed rae to a widely differ- 
ent line of remark, and would, indeed, have imperatively claimed 
of me some more substantial contribution to the objects for which 
you are associated. But your committee of invitation have 
kindly relieved me from the responsibility of selecting a topic 
from the wide field of American history, and have afforded me 
a most agreeable and welcome opportunity of fulfilling a long- 
cherished intention. They have called upon me, as one likely 
to have more than ordinary materials for such a work, as well 
as likely to take a more than ordinary interest in its performance, 
to give some ampler account than has ever yet been supplied, of 
a Family, which, while it may fairly claim a place in the history 
of the nation, as having furnished one of the most distinguished 
of our revolutionary statesmen and patriots, has been more di- 
rectly identified, both by its earliest adventures and by its latest 
acts, with the history of Maine; — of Maine, both as it once 
■,yas^ — an honored and cherished part of the good old Common- 
wealth of Massachusetts, — and as it now is, — a proud, prosper- 
ous, and independent State. 



THE LIFE AND SERVICES OF JAMES BOWDOIN. 91 

In preparing myself to comply with this call, I have felt bound 
to abandon all ideas of ambitious rhetoric, to forego all custom 
of declamation, to clip the wings of any little fancy which I 
might possess, and to betake myself to a diligent examination 
of such private papers and public records as might promise to 
throw light upon my subject. I come now, gentlemen, to lay 
before you, in the simplest manner, the fruits of my research. 

I hold in my hand an original manuscript in the French lan- 
guage, which, being interpreted, is as follows : 

"To his Excellency, the Governor-in-Chief of New England, humbly prays Pierre 
Baudouin, saying : that having been obliged, by the rigors which were exercised to- 
wards the Protestants in France, to depart thence with his family, and having sought 
refuge in the realm of Ireland, at the City of Dublin, to which place it pleased the 
Receivers of His Majesty's Customs to admit him, your petitioner was employed in 
one of the bureaux ; but afterwards, there being a change of officers, he was left with- 
out any employment. This was what caused the petitioner and his family, to the num- 
ber of six persons, to withdraw into this territory, in the town of Casco, and Province 
of Maine ; and seeing that there are many lands which are not occupied, and particu- 
larly those which are situated at the point of Barbary Creek, may it please your Ex- 
cellency to decree that there may be assigned to your petitioner about one hundred 
acres, to the end that he may have the means of supporting his fivmily. And he will 
continue to pray God for the health and prosperity of your Excellency. 

"Pierre Baudouin." 

Such was the first introduction into New England of a name 
which was destined to be connected with not a few of the most 
important events of its subsequent history, and which is now 
indissolubly associated with more than one of its most cherished 
institutions of education, literature, and science. 

Driven out from his home and native land by the fury of that 
religious persecution, for which Louis XIV. gave the signal by 
the revocation of the edict of Nantz, — disappointed in his at- 
tempt to secure the means of an humble support in Ireland, 
whither he had at first fled, — Pierre Baudouin, in the summer 
of 1687, presents himself as a suppliant to Sir Edmund Andros, 
then Governor-in-Chief of New England, for a hundred acres of 
unoccupied land at the point of Barbary Creek in Casco Bay, 
in the Province of Maine, that he may earn bread for himself 
and his family by the sweat of his brow. 

He was one of that noble sect of Huguenots, of which John 



92 TUE LIFE AND SERVICES OF JAMES EOTVDOIN. 

Calvin may be regarded as the great founder and exemplar, — 
of which Gaspard de Coligny, the generous and gallant admiral, 
who " filled tlie kingdom of France with the glory and terror of 
his name for the space of twelve years," was one of the most 
devoted disciples and one of the most lamented martyrs, — and 
which has furnished' to our own land blood every way worthy 
of beinsf mineled with the best that has ever flowed in the veins 
either of southern Cavalier or northern Pmitan. 

He was of that same noble stock which gave three Presidents 
out of nine to the old Congress of the Confederation ; which gave 
her Laurenses and Marions, her Hugers and Manigaults, her Pri- 
oleaus and Gaillards and Legares to South Carolina; which 
gave her Jays to New York, her Boudinots to New Jersey, her 
Brimmers, her Dexters, and her Peter Faneuil, with the Cradle 
of Liberty, to Massachusetts. 

He came from the famous town of Rochelle, which was for so 
many years the very stronghold and rallying point of Protestant- 
ism in France, and which, in 1629, held out so long and so hero- 
ically against the siege, which Richelieu himself thought it no 
shame to conduct in person. 

He is said to have been a physician by profession. The mere 
internal evidence of the paper which I have produced, though 
the idiom may not be altogether of the latest Parisian, shows 
him to have been a man of education. While, without insisting 
on tracing back his pedigree, as others have done, either to 
Baldwin, Count of Flanders in 862, or to Baldwin the chival- 
rous King of Jerusalem in 1143, both of whom, it seems, spelled 
their names precisely as he did, there is ample testimony that he 
was a man both of family and fortune in his own land. 

" I am the eldest descendant," wrote James Bowdoin, the 
patron of the College within whose precincts w^e are assembled, 
" from one of those unfortunate families which w^as obliged to 
fly their native country on account of religion; — a family, which, 
as I understand, lived in aflluence, perhaps elegance, upon a 
handsome estate in the neighborhood of Rochelle, which at that 
time (1685) yielded the considerable income of 700 louis d'ors 
per annum." 

This estate was, of course, irrecoverably forfeited by his flight. 



THE LIFE AND SERVICES OF JAMES BOWDOIN. 93 

and at the end of two years of painful and perilous adventure, 
. he landed upon the shores of New England, with no other 
wealth but a wife and four children, and the freedom to worship 
God after the dictates of his own conscience. 

His petition, which has no date of its own, but which is en- 
dorsed 2d August, 1687, was favorably received by Sir Edmund 
Andros, and the public records in the State department of Mas- 
sachusetts contain a warrant, signed by Sir Edmund, and direct- 
ed to Mr. Richard Clements, deputy surveyor, authorizing and 
requiring him to lay out one hundred acres of vacant land in 
CascG Bay for Pierre Baudouin, in such place as he should be 
directed by Edward Tyng, Esq., one of his majesty's council. 
The warrant bears date October 8, 1687. 

Before this warrant was executed, however, Pierre Baudouin 
had obtained possession of a few acres of land on what is now 
the high road from Portland to Vaughan's Bridge, a few rods 
northerly of the house of the Hon. Nicholas Emery. A solitary 
apple tree, and a few rocks which apparently formed the curbing 
of a well, were all that remained about twenty years ago, to 
mark the site of this original dwelling-place of the Bowdoins in 
America. I know not whether even these could now be found. 

In this original dwelling-place, Pierre and his family remained 
only about two years and a half. Pie had probably heard of the 
successful establishment in Boston, a year or two previously, of 
a Protestant church by some of his fellow fugitives from France. 
He is likely to have been still more strongly prompted to an early 
abandonment of this residence, by its extreme exposure to the 
hostile incursions and depredations of the French and Indians, 
who were leagued together, at this time, in an attempt to break 
up the British settlements on this part of the North American 
continent. And most narrowly, and most providentially, did he 
escape this peril. On the 17th of May, 1690, the fort at Casco 
was attacked and destroyed, and a general massacre of the set- 
tlers was perpetrated by the Indians. On the 16th, just twenty- 
four hours previously, Pierre Baudouin and his fajnily had plucked 
up their stakes and departed for Boston. A race which had sur- 
vived the Massacre of St. Bartholomew's, and the siege of Ro- 
chelle, was not destined to perish thus ignobly in the wilderness I 



94 THE LIFE AND SERVICES OF JAMES BOWDOIN. 

Pierre himself, however, lived but a short time after his arrival 
at Boston, and his eldest son, James, was left at the age of seven- 
teen years, with the charge of maintaining a mother, a younger 
brother, and two sisters, in a strange land. 

The energy, perseverance, and success with which this trying 
responsibility was met and was discharged by James Bowdoin 
(the first of that name in America,) is sufficiently attested by the 
fact, that he soon rose to the very first rank among the merchants 
of Boston, that he was chosen a member of the Colonial Coun- 
cil for several years before his death, and that he left to his 
children, as the fruit of a. long life of industry and integrity, the 
greatest estate which had ever been possessed, at that day, 
by any one person in Massachusetts ; an estate which I have 
seen estimated at from fifty to one hundred thousand pounds 
sterling. 

Of the two sons, who succeeded equally to the largest part 
of this estate, James Bowdoin, who will form the principal sub- 
ject of this discourse, was the youngest. 

He was born in Boston on the 7th of August, 1726, and after 
receiving the rudiments of his education at the South Grammar 
School of that town, under Master Lovell, he was sent to Har- 
vard College, where he was graduated a Bachelor of Arts in 
1745. The death of his father occurred about two years later, 
and he was thus left with an independent estate just as he had 
attained to his majority, 

It is hardly to be presumed that a young man of twenty-one 
years of age, of a liberal education, and an ample fortune, would 
devote himself at once and exclusively to mere mercantile pur- 
suits. Nor am I inclined to believe that he ever gave much 
practical attention to them. But the earliest letter directed to 
him, which I find among the family papers, proves that he must 
have been, at least nominally, engaged in commercial business. 
It is directed to " Mr. James Bowdoin, Merchant." 

This letter, however, has a far higher interest than as merely 
designating an address. It is dated Philadelphia, Oct. 25, 1750, 
and is in the following words: 

"Sir, — Enclosed with this I send you nil my Electrical papers fairly transcribed, 
and I have, as you desired, examined the copy, and find it correct. I shall be glad to 



THE LIFE AND SERVICES OF JAMES BOWDOIN. 95 

have your observations on tlicm ; and if in any part I have not made myself well 
understood, I will no notice endeavor to explain tiie obscure passages by letter. 

"My compliments to Mr. Cooper and the other gentleman who were with you here. 
I hope you all got safe home. 

"I am, Sir, your most humble servant, 

"B. FRANKLIN." 



The young Bowdoin, it seems, — who at the date of this 
letter was but four-and-twenty years old, — had made a journey 
to Philadelphia, (a journey at that day almost equal to a voyage 
to London at this,) in company with his friend and pastor, the 
Reverend Samuel Cooper, afterwards the celebrated Dr. Cooper 
of Brattle Street Church, — and having there sought the acquaint- 
ance of Dr. Franklin, had so impressed himself upon his regard 
and respect, that Franklin, in transmitting to him his electrical 
papers, takes occasion to invite his observations upon them. 

Franklin was then at the age of forty-four years, and in the 
very maturity of his powers. Although he was at this time 
holding an office connected with the post-office department of 
the Colonies, as the frank on the cover of this letter indicates, he 
was already deeply engaged in those great philosophical inquiries 
and experiments which were soon to place him on the highest 
pinnacle of fame. 

The acquaintance between Franklin and Bowdoin, which had 
thus been formed at Philadelphia, was rapidly ripened into a 
most intimate and enduring friendship ; and with this letter com- 
menced a correspondence which terminated only with their lives. 

At the outset of this correspondence, Bowdoin appears to 
have availed himself of the invitation to make observations on 
Franklin's theories and speculations, with somewhat more of 
independence of opinion than might have been expected from 
the disparity of their ages. One of his earliest letters (21st 
Dec. 1751) suggested such forcible objections to the hypothesis,, 
that the sea was the grand source of electricity, that Franklin 
was led to say in his reply, (24th January, 1752,) — "I grow 
more doubtful of my former supposition, and more ready to 
allow weight to that objection, (drawn from the activity of the 
electric fluid and the readiness of water to conduct,) which you. 
have indeed stated with great strength and clearness." In the- 



96 THE LIFE AXD SERVICES OF JAMES BOWDOIN. 

following year Franklin retracted this hypothesis altogether. 
The same letter of Bowdoin's contained an elaborate explication 
of the cause of the crooked direction of lightning, which Frank- 
lin pronounced, in his reply, to be " both ingenious and solid," — 
adding, " when we can account as satisfactorily for the electrifi- 
cation of clouds, I think that branch of natural philosophy will 
be nearly complete." 

In a subsequent letter, Bowdoin suggested a theory in regard 
to the luminousness of water under certain circumstances, ascrib- 
ing it to the presence of minute phosphorescent animals, of which 
Franklin said, in his reply, (13th Dec. 1753,) — " The observations 
you made of the sea water emitting more or less light in differ- 
ent tracts passed through by your boat, is new, and your mode 
of accounting for it ingenious. It is, indeed, very possible, that 
an extremely small animalcule, too small to be visible even by 
our best glasses, may yet give a visible light." This theory has 
since been very generally received. 

Franklin soon after paid our young philosopher the more sub- 
stantial and unequivocal compliment of sending his letters to 
London, where they were read at the Royal Society, and pub- 
lished in a volume with his own. The Royal Society, at a later 
day, made Bowdoin one of their fellows ; and Franklin, writing 
to Bowdoin from .London, Jan. 13, 1772, says : " It gives me 
great pleasure that my book afforded any to my friends. I 
esteem those letters of yours among its brightest ornaments, 
and have the satisfaction to find that they add greatly to the 
reputation of American philosophy." 

But the sympathies of Franklin and Bowdoin were not des- 
tined to be long confined to philosophical inquiries. There were 
other clouds than those of the sky, gathering thickly and darkly 
around them, and which were about to require another and more 
practical sort of science, to break their force and rob them of 
their fires. " Eripidt ccclo fulmen, sceptmmqiie tyrannis " is the 
proud motto upon one of the medals which were struck in honor 
of Franklin. Bowdoin, we shall see, was one of his counsellors 
and coadjutors in both the processes which secured for him this 
enviable ascription. 



THE LIFE AND SERVICES OF JAMES BOWDOIN. 97 

Bowdoin entered into political life in the year 1753, as one of 
the four representatives of Boston, in the Provincial Legislature 
of Massachusetts, and remained a member of the House for 
three years, having been reelected by the same constituency in 
1754 and 1755. 

The American Colonies were, at this moment, mainly engaged 
in resisting the encroachments of the French upon their bound- 
aries. The Colony of Massachusetts Bay devoted itself, with 
especial zeal, to this object. It was said, and truly said, by their 
Councillors in 1755, in an answer to one of Governor Shirley's 
Messages, " that since the peace of Aix la Chapelle (1748) we 
have been at more expense for preventing and removing the 
French encroachments, we do not say than any other Colony, 
but than all His Majesty's Colonies besides." 

Bowdoin appears from the journals to have cooperated cor- 
dially in making provision for the expeditions to Nova Scotia 
and Crown Point, and in all the military measures of defence. 
He seems, however, to have been more particularly interested in 
promoting that great civil or political measure of safety and 
security which was so seriously agitated at this time, — the 
Union of the Colonies. 

In June, 1754, a convention of delegates from the various 
Colonies was held at Albany, under Royal authority and recom- 
mendation, to consider a plan of uniting the Colonies in mea- 
sures for their general defence. Of this convention Franklin 
was a member, and a plan of general union, known afterwards 
as the Albany plan of union, but of which he was the projector 
and proposer, was conditionally adopted by the unanimous vote 
of the delegates. The condition was, that it should be conr 
firmed by the various Colonial Assemblies. 

In December, 1754, the measure was largely debated in the 
House of Representatives of Massachusetts, and on the 14th 
day of that month, the House came to a vote on the three fol- 
lowing questions : — 

1. " Whether the House accept of the general plan of union 
as reported by the commissioners convened at Albany in June 
last." This was decided in the negative. 

2. " Whether the House accept of the partial plan of union 

9 



98 THE LIFE AND SERVICES OF JAMES BOWDOIN. 

reported by the last committee of both Houses, appointed on 
the Union." This, also, was decided in the negative. 

3. " Whether it be the mind of the House, that there be a 
General Union of his Majesty's Colonies on this Continent, ex- 
cept those of Nova Scotia and Georgia." This proposition 
was decided in the affirmative by a large majority. 

The proceedings of the legislative bodies of the Colonies, and 
indeed of all other legislative bodies, wherever they existed 
throughout the world, were at that time conducted in secrecy. 
As late as 1776, Congress discussed every thing with closed 
doors, and we are indebted to Mr. Jefferson's Notes for all that 
we know of the debates on the Declaration of Independence. 
Even to this day, there is no authority for the admission either 
of reporters or listeners to the halls of the British Parliament. 
A single member may demand, at any moment, that the gal- 
leries be cleared, and may insist on the execution of the demand. 
Practically, however, the proceedings of Parliament and of 
almost all other legislative bodies are now public, and no one 
can over-estimate the importance of the change. 

Doubtless, when debates were conducted with closed doors, 
there were no speeches for Buncombe, no clap-traps for the gal- 
leries, no flourishes for the ladies, and it required no hour-rule, 
perhaps, to keep men within some bounds of relevancy. But 
one of the great sources of instruction and information, in regard 
both to the general measures of government, and to the particu- 
lar conduct of their own representatives, was then shut out from 
the people, and words which might have roused them to the 
vindication of justice or to the overthrow of tyranny were lost 
in the utterance. The perfect publicity of legislative proceed- 
ings is hardly second to the freedom of the press, in its influence 
upon the progress and perpetuity of human liberty, though, like 
the freedom of the press, it may be attended with inconve- 
niences and abuses. 

It is a most significant fact in this connection, that the earliest 
instance of authorized publicity being given to the deliberations 
of a legislative body in modern days, was in this same House 
of Representatives of Massachusetts, on the 3d day of June, 
1766, when, upon motion of James Otis, and during the debates 



THE LIFE AND SERVICES OF JAMES BOWDOIN. 99 

which arose on the questions of the repeal of the stamp act, and 
of compensation to the sufferers by the riots in Boston, to which 
that act had given occasion, a resolution was carried " for open- 
ing a gallery for such as wished to hear the debates." The 
influence of this measure in preparing the public mind for the 
great revolutionary events which were soon to follow, can hardly 
be exaggerated. 

Of the debates in 1754, on the union of the Colonies, we, of 
course, have no record. But I find among the family papers, a 
brief and imperfect memorandum, in his own hand-writing, of 
a speech made by Bowdoin on this occasion. 

" It seems to be generally allowed (said he) that an union of 
some sort is necessary. If that be granted, the only question to 
be considered is, whether the union shall be general or partial. 
It has been my opinion, and still is, that a general union would 
be most salutary. If the Colonies were united, they could easily 
drive the French out of this part of America ; but, in a dis- 
united state, the French, though not a tenth part so numerous, 
are an overmatch for them all. They are under one head and 
one direction, and all pull one way ; whereas the Colonies have 
no head, some of them are under no direction in military mat- 
ters, and all pull different w^ays. Join or Die, must be their 
motto." 

After alluding to the importance of a union in reference to 
the Indian trade, he goes on to say, that " another advantage of 
a general union is, that the French Cape Breton trade would be 
put an end to." 

" This trade (he continued) has been long complained of, not 
only as detrimental to our own trade, but as the French have, 
by means thereof, been furnished with provisions of all kinds, 
not only for themselves at Louisburg, but for Canada and the 
forces which they have employed on the Ohio. The flour they 
had there was marked by the Philadelphia and New York brand. 
They are supplied from the Colonies with the means of eff'ecting 
their destruction ; and their destruction will be the consequence 
of that trade, unless it be stopped. And it must he stopped by 
being subjected to the regulations of a general union.^^ 

Thus early did Bowdoin suggest and advocate that great idea 



100 THE LIFE AND SERVICES OP JAMES BOWDOIN. 

of a general union of the Colonies for the regulation of trade, 
which we shall find him, almost half a century afterwards, in 
no small degree instrumental in accomplishing and realizing 
through the adoption of the Federal Constitution. 

The prominent part which he took, in 1754, in favor of the 
measure, is proved by the fact, that immediately after the adop- 
tion of the proposition which I have stated, he was made the 
chairman of a committee of seven, on the part of the House, 
with such as the Council might join, "to consider and report a 
o-eneral plan of union of the several Colonies on this Continent, 
except those of Nova Scotia and Georgia." 

It appears that this committee agreed upon such a plan, and 
that it was adopted by the Council. On being brought down 
to the House, however, its consideration was deferred, to allow 
time for members to consult their constituents, and a motion to 
print it was negatived. It was never again taken up, and I 
know not that any copy of it remains. Greater dangers, and 
from a more formidable source, were needed, to impress upon 
the Colonies the vital importance of that Union, without which 
their liberties and independence never could have been achieved. 
Nor were such greater dangers distant. 

In May, 1757, after an interval of a single year from the ter- 
mination of his three years' service in the House of Representa- 
tives, Bowdoin was elected by that body a member of the 
Council. 

The Council of that day was not a mere Executive Council, 
like that which exists under the present Constitution of Massa- 
chusetts, but was a coordinate and independent branch of the 
Colonial Legislature. It was composed of twenty-eight mem- 
bers, a larger number than the Senate of the United States con- 
tained at the adoption of the Constitution, and was in almost 
every respect analogous to the Senates of our own day. To 
this body Bowdoin was annually reelected, from 1757 to 1774, 
and he actually served as a member of it, with what zeal and 
ability we shall presently see, during sixteen of these seventeen 
successive years. 

It would not be easy to overstate the importance to the ulti- 
mate success of American liberty and independence, of the 



THE LIFE AND SERVICES OF JAMES BOWDOIN. 101 

course pursued by the Council and House of Representatives of 
Massachusetts, during the greater part of this long period. 
Even as early as 1757, a controversy sprung up between these 
bodies and Lord Loudoun, the British commander-in-chief, in 
regard to quartering and billeting his troops upon the citizens of 
Boston, which by no means faintly foreshadowed the great dis- 
putes which were to follow. In this controversy, the authority 
of an act of Parliament in the Colony was boldly, and, it is 
believed, for the first time in our history, denied; and an earnest 
protestation was made that the colonists were entitled to all the 
rights and privileges of Englishmen. 

The Provincial Governor of that period, however, — Thomas 
Pownall, — was too moderate and too liberal in his administra- 
tion, and was, moreover, too deeply interested in the prosecu- 
tion of those glorious campaigns of Wolfe and Amherst, in 
which Massachusetts, — and Maine, as a part of Massachusetts, 
— had so large and honorable a share, and by which the French 
power on this Continent was finally extinguished, to provoke any 
serious breach between himself and the Legislative Assemblies. 

But Sir Francis Bernard, his successor, was another sort of 
person, and from his accession in 1760, down to the very day 
on which the last British governor was finally driven from our 
shores, there was one continued conflict between the legislative 
and executive authorities. 

Governor Bernard, in his very first speech to the Assembly, 
gave a clue to his whole political character and course, by allud- 
ing to the blessings which the Colonies derived " from their 
subjection to Great Britain ; " and the Council, in their reply to 
this speech, furnished a no less distinct indication of the spirit 
with which they were animated, by acknowledging how much 
they owed " to their relation to Great Britain." 

Indeed, if any one would fully understand the rise and pro- 
gress of revolutionary principles on this Continent ; if he would 
understand the arbitrary and tyrannical doctrines which were 
asserted by the British Ministry, and the prompt resistance and 
powerful refutation which they met at the hands of our New 
England patriots, he must read what are called " The Massa- 
chusetts State Papers," consisting, mainly, of the messages of 
9* 



102 THE LIFE AND SERVICES OF JAMES BOWDOIN. 

the Governor to the Legislature, and the answers of the two 
branches of the Legislature to the Governor, during this period. 
He will find here almost all the great principles and questions 
of that momentous controversy. Trial by Jury, Regulation of 
Trade, Taxation without Representation, the Stamp Act, the 
Tea Tax, and the rest, stated and argued with unsurpassed 
ability and spirit. It was by these State Papers, more, perhaps, 
than by any thing else, that the people of that day were in- 
structed as to the great rights and interests which were at stake, 
and the popular heart originally and gradually prepared for the 
great issue of Independence. If James Otis's argument against 
Writs of Assistance in 1761, (as was said by John Adams,) 
"breathed into this nation the breath of life," few things, if any 
thing, did more to prolong that breath, and sustain that life 
through the trying period of the nation's infancy, until it was 
able to go alone, than the answers of the House of Representa- 
tives of Massachusetts to the insolent assumptions of Bernard 
and Hutchinson, mainly drafted by the same James Otis and 
Samuel Adams, and the answers of the Council, mainly drafted 
by James Boivdoin. 

Of the first-rate part which Bowdoin played, during his long 
service in the Council, we have the fullest testimony from the 
most unquestionable sources. 

Governor Hutchinson, who was himself a principal actor in 
the scenes which he describes, and who will not be suspected of 
any undue partiality to Bowdoin, furnishes unequivocal testi- 
mony as to his course. 

" In most of the addresses, votes, and other proceedings in 
Council, of importance, for several years past, (says he, in the 
third volume of his History of Massachusetts, at the commence- 
ment of the year 1766,) the Lieutenant Governor, (Hutchinson 
himself) had been employed as the chairman of the committees. 
Mr. Bowdoin succeeded him, and obtained a greater influence 
over the Council than his predecessor ever had ; and being 
united in principle with the leading men in the House, measures 
were concerted between him and them, and from this time the 
Council, in matters which concerned the controversy between 
the Parliament and the Colonies, in scarcely any instance dis- 
agreed with the House." 



THE LIFE AND SERVICES OF JAMES BOWDOIN. 103 

Again, under date of 1770, Hutchinson says, " Bowdoin was 
without a rival in the Council, and by the harmony and recipro- 
cal communications between him and Mr. S. Adams, the mea- 
sures of Council and House harmonized also, and were made 
reciprocally subservient each to the other ; so that when the 
Governor met with oppositi,on from the one, he had reason to 
expect like opposition from the other." 

Hutchinson also states, under the same date, that " Bowdoin 
greatly encouraged, if he did not first propose, (as a measure of 
retaliation for the arbitrary taxes imposed by Great Britain,) the 
association for leaving off the custom of mourning dress, for the 
loss of deceased friends ; and for ivearing, on all occasions, the 
common tnanufactures of the country^ 

Nor are these unequivocal expressions in the published his- 
tory of Hutchinson, the only testimony which has been borne 
to Bowdoin's influence in the Council and in the Common- 
wealth. 

Alexander Wedderburn, (afterwards Lord Loughborough,) 
in his infamous philippic upon Dr. Franklin, before the Privy 
Council in England, styled Bowdoin " the leader and manager 
of the Council in Massachusetts, as Mr. Adams was in the 
House." 

Sir Francis Bernard, in a private letter to the Earl of Hills- 
borough, then secretary of the Colonies, dated 30th November, 
1768, held up Mr. Bowdoin to the censure of the Ministry, " as 
having all along taken the lead of the Council in their late 
extraordinary proceedings," and, in another letter, as " the per- 
petual president, chairman, secretary, and speaker of the Coun- 
cil ; " and Sir Francis gave a practical demonstration of the 
sense which he entertained of Bowdoin's importance to the 
popular party, by negativing him as a councillor at the next 
annual election. To this most honorable proscription, by the 
most tyrannical Governor who ever administered the affairs of 
Massachusetts, Bowdoin owed that single year of intermission 
in his labors at the Council Board, to which I have heretofore 
alluded. 

But the people of Boston were not in a mood to be thus 
deprived of the patriotic services of a long-tried and favorite 



104: THE LIFE AND SERVICES OF JAMES BOWDOIN. 

servant, and, James Otis having at this moment withdrawn 
from j)ublic duty, Bowdoin was immediately chosen, in his 
place, a representative of Boston. No sooner, however, had he 
taken his seat again in this body, than the House, animated by 
the same spirit with the people of Boston, reelected him to the 
Council, and Sir Francis Bernard, having in the mean time been 
recalled, Bowdoin's election was assented to by Governor Hutch- 
inson upon grounds even more complimentary to his ability, and 
not less so to his patriotism, than those upon which he had been 
negatived by Sir Francis, — "because he thought his influence 
more prejudicial in the House of Representatives than at the 
Council." It was as the successor of Bowdoin, on this occasion, 
that John Adams first took his seat in the Legislature of Massa- 
chusetts. 

Hutchinson's reason for assenting to Bowdoin's reelection to 
the Council, is given with something more of circumstance and 
amplification, in one of his private letters to the Mi;iistry a year 
or two afterwards. In April, 1772, he wrote as follows : " Mr. 
Hancock moved in the House to address the Governor to carry 
the Court to Boston, and to assign no reason except the con- 
venience of sitting there, but this was opposed by his colleague 
Adams, and carried against the motion by three or four voices 
only. The same motion was made in Council, but opposed by 
Mr. Bowdoin, who is, and has been for several years, the princi- 
pal supporter of the opposition to the government. It ivould be 
to no purpose to negative him, for he would be chosen into the 
House, and do more mischief there than at the Board." 

It seems, however, that this reasoning was not altogether 
satisfactory to the ministers of the Crown, or to the Crown 
itself, as in 1774 Bowdoin was again negatived by General 
Gage, who had succeeded Hutchinson as Governor, and who 
declared " that he had express orders from his Majesty to set 
aside from that board Hon. Mr. Bowdoin, Mr. Dexter, and I\Ir. 
Winthrop." 

Thus terminated the services of James Bowdoin in his Ma- 
jesty's Council, and within a few months afterwards his Ma- 
jesty's Council itself was swept out of existence within the limits 
of Massachusetts. 



THE LIFE AND SERVICES OF JAMES BOWDOIN. 105 

The 17th of June, 1774, was no unfit precursor of the 17th 
of June, 1775. If the latter was the date of the first great 
physical contest for liberty, the former was the date of one of 
the earliest civil acts of revolution. The House of Represent- 
atives of Massachusetts then assembled at Salem, having come 
to a rupture with Governor Gage, and foreseeing that they 
should be immediately dissolved, ordered the door of their 
chamber to be locked, and having effectually barred out the 
Governor's secretary, proceeded, while he was actually reading 
the promulgation for their dissolution on the staircase, to do 
two most important and significant things : the one, to provide 
for holding a Provincial Congress to supply the place of the 
General Court of the Commonwealth ; the other, to elect dele- 
gates to the first Continental Congress at Philadelphia. At the 
head of these delegates stood the name of James Bowdoin. The 
others were Thomas Cushing, Samuel Adams, John Adams, and 
Robert Treat Paine. 

Had the condition of Bowdoin's family allowed him to pro- 
ceed to Philadelphia, agreeably to this appointment, there can 
hardly be a doubt that his name would now be found, where all 
the world might read it, foremost on the roll of Independence ; 
but the illness of his wife compelled him to stay at home, and 
that proud distinction was reserved for the name of John Hancock, 
who was elected as his substitute. The spirit by which he was 
actuated at this time, is abundantly indicated by a letter which 
he wrote to his friend Franklin in London, on the 6th of Sep- 
tember, 1774, just after the first Congress had assembled, and 
which was mainly written as an introduction of Josiah Quincy, 
Jr., then vainly seeking a restoration of his health by a foreign 
voyage. 

" Six regiments (says he) are now here, and General Gage, it 
is said, has sent for two or three from Canada, and expects soon 
two more from Ireland. Whether he will think these, or a much 
greater number added to them, sufficient to enforce submission 
to the act, (for reducing the province to a military government,) 
his letters to the Ministry will inform them, and time, every 
body else. In apricum proferet cctas. A sort of enthusiasm 
seems universally prevalent, and it has been greatly heightened 



106 THE LIFE AND SERVICES OF JAMES EOWDOIN. 

by the Canada act for the encouraging and establishing Popery. 
" Pro aris etfocis, our all is at stake," is the general cry through- 
out the country. Of this I have been in some measure a witness, 
having these two months past been journeying about the Pro- 
vince with Mrs. Bowdoin, on account of her health ; the bad 
state of which has prevented ray attending the Congress, for 
which the Assembly thought proper to appoint me one of their 
committee." 

Mr. Bowdoin's own health, also, about this time, gave way, 
and soon after assumed a most serious aspect. In a letter to 
John Adams from his wife, bearing date June 15th, 1775, and 
which is among the letters of Mrs. Adams recently published by 
her grandson, I find the following passage : » Mr. Bowdoin and 
his lady are at present in the house of Mrs. Borland, and are 
going to Middleborough, to the house of Judge Oliver. He, 
poor gentleman, is so low, that I apprehend he is hastening to 
a house not made with hands ; he looks like a mere skeleton, 
speaks faint and low, is racked with a violent cough, and, I 
think, far advanced in consumption. I went to see him last 
Saturday. He is very inquisitive of every person with regard 
to the times: be£;o:ed I w^ould let him know of the first intelli- 
gence I had from you ; is very unable to converse by reason of 
his cough. He rides every pleasant day, and has been kind 
enough to call at the door (though unable to get out) several 
times. He says the very name of Hutchinson distresses him. 
Speaking of him the other day, he broke out, ' Rehgious rascal ! 
how I abhor his name!'" 

I am the more particular in giving these contemporaneous 
accounts of the circumstances which prevented Bowdoin from 
taking his seat in the Continental Congress, because, in the 
violence of partisan w^arfare afterwards, his patriotism was im- 
peached on this ground. As well might the patriotism of James 
Otis be impeached, because the blows of assassins upon his 
brain, unsettling his reason, compelled him also to retire, at this 
moment, from the service of the country, and to leave others to 
reap a harvest of glory which he had sown I As well might the 
patriotism of Josiah Quincy, Jr. be impeached, because con- 
sumption, at this moment, had marked him for its prey, and he. 



THE LIFE AND SERVICES OF JAMES BOWDOIN. 107 

too, was forced to fly to milder climes, from which he only 
retm-ned to expire within sight of his native shores! 

The services of Bowdoin, however, were not yet destined to be 
lost to Massachusetts or to the country. Momentous responsi- 
bilities still awaited him, and the partial restoration of his health 
soon enabled him to meet them. 

Indeed, while his health was still failing, he served as moder- 
ator of a great meeting of the people of Boston, in Faneuil Hall, 
which was held to consider the demand which had been made 
upon them by General Gage, for the surrender of their arms. 
The meeting was one of the greatest interest and excitement, 
and was protracted through many days. Bowdoin, at the close 
of it, acted as chairman of the committee to remonstrate and 
treat with General Gage upon the subject, and I now have in 
my hand the evidence of his success, in an original paper, which 
is not without historical interest, dated Boston, April 27, 1775, 
in the following terms : 

" General Gage gives liberty to the inhabitants to remove out 
of town with their effects, and, in order to expedite said removal, 
informs the inhabitants that they may receive passes for that 
purpose from General Robinson, any time after 8 o'clock to- 
morrow morning." 

Such was the only liberty which the people of Boston could, 
in that day, extort from the British commander-in-chief, — liherly 
to abandon their homes and firesides, and to seek shelter where 
they could find it ! Even this, however, was a great point 
gained, and was far better than being exposed to the daily 
insults and depredations of a hireling soldiery. I have it under 
his own hand, that it was by his attention to this business, while 
already an invalid, that Bowdoin contracted the serious illness 
described by Mrs. Adams, by reason of which his life was at one 
time despaired of. 

In August of this same year, 1775, a Provincial Congress 
assembled at Watertown, and proceeded, under the recommenda- 
tion of the Continental Congress, to organize the first regular 
Government, by electing twenty-eight Councillors, not only to 
act as a branch of the legislative body, but to exercise the 
supreme executive, authority of the province. Bowdoin was 



108 THE LIFE AND SERVICES OF JAMES BOWDOIX. 

elected first on the list, and on the meeting of the Board was 
formally placed at its head, so that he should act as President 
of the Council whenever lie was present. Though his health 
was still infirm, he instantly accepted the appointment, and soon 
repaired to his post, and in that capacity he presided, from time 
to time for several years, over the now independent Republic. 
" This conspicuous act of overt treason," (as it was well termed 
by one who knew the meaning of the terms which he used, — 
Bowdoin's distinguished eulogist. Judge Lowell,) this conspicu- 
ous act of overt treason to the British monarch, whose ministry 
was still exercising " the pageantry of civil government within 
the province," and whose armies held possession of the capital 
almost within sight, furnishes ample evidence that Bowdoin 
shrunk from no exposure to personal proscription or peril. 

George Washington had just then assumed the command 
of the American army, encamped around Boston. Bowdoin's 
official position brought him, of course, into immediate relation 
to the commander-in-chief, and an intimate and enduring friend- 
ship was soon formed between them. Many letters of a highly 
confidential character, and a beautiful cane, now in my own 
possession, which was the gift of Bowdoin to Washington, 
and which was returned, as a precious memorial to the family 
by Mrs. Washington, after her husband's death, bear witness to 
the cordial regard which they cherished for each other. 

In tlie autumn of 1775, the Continental Congress despatched 
a special committee of its members to Cambridge, to confer 
with Washington and the authorities of the New England 
States, as to the best means of conducting the campaign. Ben- 
jamin Franklin and Benjamin Harrison, (the father of the late 
lamented President of the United States,) were two of the 
committee of Congress. Bowdoin was the chairman of the 
committee to conduct the conference on the part of Massachu- 
setts ; and by them it was agreed that an army of twenty-four 
thousand men should be raised for the ensuing year, and that 
the several Colonies should be called on for their respective pro- 
portions of money to meet the expenses of supporting them. 

It was about this time that Washington said to some timid 
Whigs in Massachusetts, " You need not fear, when you have 
a Bowdoin at your head." 



THE LIFE AND SERVICES OF JAMES BOWDOIN. 109 

It was through the confidential agency of Bowdoin, some 
years afterwards, in 1780, that Washington procured a plan of 
the harbor of Halifax, with the depth of the water, and the po- 
sition of all the military works, with a view to its destruction 
by the French fleet. 

Nor may it be uninteresting, or out of place, to mention here, 
that on the night on which Washington threw up the redoubts 
on Dorchester Heights, which compelled the British army to 
evacuate Boston on the seventeenth of March, he was accompa- 
nied by Bowdoin's son, James, (afterwards the patron of the 
College,) a young man then of twenty-two years of age, who, 
after being graduated at Harvard, had gone over to England, 
partly on account of his health, and partly to pursue his studies 
at the University of Oxford, but who had hurried back to share 
the fortunes of his native land instantly on the breaking out of 
hostilities. The young Bowdoin also crossed over in the same 
boat with Washington on his entrance into Boston, after the 
departure of the British, and took him to dine at his grandfather 
Erving's, where, we are told, the greatest delicacy the town af- 
forded " was only a piece of salted beef." 

Mr. Bowdoin, the father, was reelected to the Council in 1776 
and 1777, and continued to serve as its presiding ofiicer, when- 
ever his health permitted him to attend its meetings, until the 
summer of 1777, when he resigned. 

In 1776, on the receipt of the news of the Declaration of In- 
dependence, he was made chairman of the committee to direct 
and personally superintend its proclamation from the balcony of 
the Old State House in Boston. He was, also, the chairman of 
the committee to conduct the affairs of the Commonwealth 
during the recess of the General Court. 

In 1779, Bowdoin was brought back again into the public ser- 
vice by being elected a delegate from the town of Boston to the 
Convention which framed the Constitution of Massachusetts. 
One attempt to accomplish this work had already been made by 
the Legislature during the previous year, but the plan had been re- 
jected by the people. The greatest minds of the Commonwealth 
were now called together to repair the failure. Samuel Adams 
and John Adams, Hancock, the elder John Lowell, Theophilus 

10 



110 THE LIFE AND SERVICES OF JAMES BOWDOIN. 

Parsons, the elder John Pickering, George Cabot, Nathaniel 
Gorham, James Sullivan, the elder Levi Lincoln, Robert Treat 
Paine, Jonathan Jackson, Henry Iligginson, Nathaniel Tracy, 
Samuel Osgood, William Gushing, and Caleb Strong, were 
amons: the members of this Convention. Your own Province 
of Maine was represented, among others, by David Sewall and 
Benjamin Chadbourne. Well might it be said that "to this 
Convention were returned from all parts of the Commonwealth, 
as great a number of men of learning, talents, and patriotism, 
as had ever been assembled here at any earlier period." It may 
be doubted, whether any later period has ever witnessed its equal. 
Of this Convention, Bowdoin was the President. 

His position as presiding officer, however, did not exempt him 
from the more active duties of membership, and, during the long 
recess of the Convention, he served as chairman of the select 
committee, by which the original draft of the Constitution was 
digested and prepared. His friend and eulogist. Judge Lowell, 
who was himself second to no one in that Convention, either 
for the zeal or the ability which he brought to the work, says 
of Bowdoin, that " it is owing to the hints which he occasionally 
gave, and the part which he took with the committee who framed 
the plan, that some of the most admired sections in the Consti- 
tution of this State appear in their present form;" and he adds, 
"this assembly of wise men carried home with them such im- 
pressions of his character as an able and virtuous statesman, that 
they retained the highest respect and esteem for him till his death." 

At the organization of the government of the Commonwealth 
under this new Constitution, John Hancock was elected to the 
chief magistracy. There having been no choice of a Lieutenant 
Governor by the people, the Legislature, on their assembling, 
elected Bowdoin to that office. They, also, simultaneously 
elected him a Senator for the County of Suffolk, leaving it 
optional with himself to decide in which capacity he would 
serve the State, and intimating, certainly, in the most compli- 
mentary manner, their unwillingness that the State should be 
deprived of his services altogether. Bowdoin, however, declined 
both these offices, as he did, also, the appointment of agent to 
negotiate a loan in Europe, which, about this time, was offered 



THE LIFE AND SERVICES OF JAMES BOWDOIN. Ill 

to him. But in the subsequent winter he accepted an appoint- 
ment from the Legislature, in company with the Justices of the 
Supreme Court, the Attorney-General, and Mr. John Pickering, 
" to revise the laws in force in the State ; to select, abridge, alter, 
and digest them, so as to be accommodated to the present Go- 
vernment." I have seen ample evidence, in his private papers, 
of the labor which he bestowed on the duties of this distin- 
guished and most responsible commission. 

In 1782, Bowdoin was chosen a representative from Boston, 
but declined the office. 

In January, 1785, Hancock resigned his place as Chief Magis- 
trate of Massachusetts. At the ensuing April election there 
was no choice by the people, but on the meeting of the Legisla- 
ture in May, Bowdoin was elected Governor, by the Senate, out 
of the candidates sent up to that body by the House of Repre- 
sentatives. 

It was during the popular canvass preceding this election, 
that a charge was brought against Bowdoin that he was in 
British interest and under British inlluence. In these latter days, 
such a charge, against whomsoever it were arrayed, could excite 
little surprise. It is the penalty of modern public life, to be 
abused. Not to be the subject of some false report, of some 
slanderous charge, of some calumnious imputation, would seem 
almost to imply that one was too insignificant to attract notice. 
So uniformly does abuse or misrepresentation follow any consi- 
derable fame, that a public man is almost tempted to exclaim in 
the words of an old ballad, — 

" Liars will lee on full guid meu 
Sae will they do on me ; 
I wad'na wish to be the man, 
That liars on wad'na lee." 

But that one who had been so early and ardent an opposer of 
British oppression and British dominion, and who, as we have 
seen, had cooperated personally and prominently in almost all 
the measures by which that aggression had been successfully 
resisted, and that dominion finally thrown oftj should now so soon 
have been subjected to such an imputation upon his patriotism, 



112 THE LIFE AND SERVICES OF JAMES BOWDOIN. 

and such an impeachment of his integrity, must certainly asto- 
nish every one, who has not become familiar with the habitual 
disingenuousness and unscrupulousness of modern partisan war- 
fare. 

The only points relied upon to give color to this infamous ac- 
cusation were, first, Bowdoin's failure to attend the Continental 
Congress in 1774, when, as we have sufiiciently seen, the illness 
of his wife, and the critical condition of his own health, detained 
him at home; and, second, the marriage of Bowdoin's only 
daughter with Sir John Temple. 

The late estimable and distinguished author of the " Familiar 
Sketches of Public Characters," which are believed to be gene- 
rally as correct, as they certainly are spirited and interesting, 
says that Bowdoin was suspected of English partialities, " be- 
cause an Englishman who bore a title had become his son-in- 
law." 

Now the fact is, that John Temple was a Boston boy, born at 
Noddle's Island, now East Boston, of parents who had long re- 
sided in this country, and that he did not inherit his baronetcy 
from his great grandfather until nearly eighteen months after this 
election was over. He had been, moreover, a thorough Whig 
during the whole of our Revolution, and had paid the penalty 
of his opposition to the British Ministry by the loss of more than 
one office, of which the emoluments were in the last degree ne- 
cessary to his support. It was of Temple that Arthur Lee, then 
in London, wrote to Samuel Adams, December 22, 1773, " There 
is no man more obnoxious to Hillsborough, Bernard, Knox, and 
all that tribe of determined enemies to truth, to virtue, liberty, 
and America." 

It is, indeed, not a little curious, that, while in 1785, Bowdoin 
was charged with being in British interest, on account of his con- 
nection with Temple, — in 1770, Bowdoin's original opposition 
/ to Great Britain was attributed to the very same cause. " Dur- 
/ ing the administration of Shirley and Pownall, (says Governor 
Hutchinson in his third volume,) Bowdoin was considered rather 
as a favorer of the prerogative, than of the opposition to it. But 
Mr. Temple, the Surveyor-General of the Customs, having mar- 
ried Mr. Bowdoin's daughter, and having differed with Governor 



THE LIFE AND SERVICES OF JAMES BOWDOIN. 113 

Bernard, and connected himself with Mr. Otis and others in the 
opposition, Mr. Bowdoin, from that time, entered into the like 
connections." 

Hutchinson is still more explicit upon this point in some of 
his private letters. In a letter to Commodore (afterwards Ad- 
miral) Gambler, dated 7th May, 1772, he says: "Of the two 
you mentioned, one in the Common and the other near it, (Bow- 
doin's elegant mansion near the Common is still freshly remem- 
bered,) I have found the first pliable, and have made great use 
of him, and expect to make more ; the other is envious, and with 
dark, secret plottings endeavors to distress Government; and, 
although I am upon terms of civility with him, yet when the 
faction in the House have any point to carry, they are sure of 
his support in Council, and he is as obstinate as a mule. I do 
not find the advice, that his son-in-law is like to be provided for 
in England, has any effect upon him. If I see any chance of 
bringing him over, and making him a friend to Government, I 
will try it ; in the mean time, I will bear with his opposition as 
I have done for several years past. This inter nos^ 

It seems thus, that Hutchinson was about to make a trial 
upon Bowdoin's patriotism, with a view of seeing if there was 
" any chance of bringing him over, and making him a friend to 
Government." And in a letter to Sir Francis Bernard, dated 
25th August, 1772, four months afterwards, we have some 
glimpses of the result of the attempt. 

" Before Commodore Gambler sailed, (he says,) he hinted to 
me the same thing he did to you after his arrival in England. 

I thought it was suggested to him by , and I took it to be 

only his opinion of the effect such an expectation might have, 
and I have no reason to think Mr. B. was privy to the suggestion. 
His conduct in Council is very little different from what it was 
in your administration, and he runs into the foolish notions of 
Adams & Co., and when Government is the subject, talks their 
jargon. On other occasions, we are just within the bounds of 
decency. One would have thought the unexpected favors shown 
to his son-in-law would have softened him. I don't know but 
he may have been rather more cautious in his language, but he 
joins in the same measures." 

10* 



114 THE LIFE AND SERVICES OF JAMES BOWDOIN. 

Bowdoin himself gave the best evidence, not many months 
afterwards, with what success he had been approached, and 
how far he had even become " more cautious in his language," 
in the prompt and powerful stand which he took against Hutch- 
inson's elaborate message to the Legislature, upholding the 
power of Parliament over the Colonies ; in regard to which, 
Hutchinson wrote to General Gage, on the 7th of March, 
1773, — u 'phe Council would have acquiesced, if Mr. Bowdoin 
had not persuaded them that he could defend Lord Chatham's 
doctrine, that Parliament had no right of taxation ; but by his 
repugnant arguments he has exposed himself to contempt." 

A copy of these "repugnant arguments" is in my posses- 
sion, in Bowdoin's handwriting, as they are printed among the 
Massachusetts State Papers; and no one can read them without 
feeling that, if they exposed him to the "contempt" of this 
pliant tool of royalty, they have entitled him to the respect and 
gratitude of every American patriot. The paper is, unquestion- 
ably, among the ablest compositions to which the controversies 
of that day gave occasion, and was the immediate cause of 
Bowdoin's being negatived, at his next election to the Council, 
by the express order of his Majesty. 

Temple, it appears, had been appointed in December, 1771, 
survevor-general of the customs in England. He had been 
refused all farther employment in America on the ground of his 
known attachment to the cause of his native country, the King 
himself having signified to Lord North that he must not be 
suffered to return to the Colonies in any public capacity. But 
his zeal for the interests of the Colonies could not thus be extin- 
guished ; and in 1774, he was summarily removed from office, 
for reasons which are set forth in a paper bearing his own signa- 
ture, which was addressed to the Government of Massachusetts 
in 1791, and which begins as follows : 

« Dr. Franklin and Mr. Temple were, in the year 1774, upon 
one and the same day, and for one and the same cause, dis- 
missed from the several employments they held under the crown 
of Great Britain ; expressly for their attachment to the American 
cause ; and particularly for their having obtained and transmitted 
to the State of Massachusetts, certain original letters and papers, 



THE LIFE AND SERVICES OF JAMES BOWDOIN. 115 

which first discovered, with certainty, the perfidious plans then 
machinating against the freedom and happiness of the then 
Colonies, now United States in North America; Mr. Temple, 
by such dismission, lost upwards of a thousand pounds sterling 
per annum, besides several very honorary appointments under 
the crown ; Dr. Franklin's loss was about five hundred pounds 
a year." 

This distinct and public declaration during the lifetime of 
Franklin, corroborated as it is by a previous and private com- 
munication to John Adams, removes all doubt as to the fact, 
that it was through Temple's cooperation with Franklin that 
the famous Hutchinson letters were sent over to this country, and 
furnishes another proof that his employment and salaries abroad 
had, in no degree, diminished his interest in the cause of Ameri- 
can Liberty. 

It would be quite out of place to follow the course and cha- 
racter of Sir John Temple further on this occasion. I have said 
enough to show how utterly groundless were any imputations 
upon Bowdoin's patriotism, arising out of his connection with 
Temple. I have said enough to prove how justly it was said 
of Bowdoin at his death, — " He was in every sense a patriot. 
He connected himself with those who were determined not to 
be slaves. It was in his power to have made any terms for 
himself, if he could have deserted his principles; but firm and 
incorruptible, he put every thing at hazard." 

The condition of Massachusetts, and of the nation at large, 
when Bowdoin assumed the Chief Magistracy of the Common- 
wealth, (if there was any thing which could be called a nation 
in 1785,) was most critical. Both were overwhelmed with the 
debts of the Revolution, and no effective system of finance had 
been established for their discharge. Indeed, the resources of 
the people were already utterly exhausted, and a wide-spread 
bankruptcy seemed almost inevitable. Bowdoin, however, stood 
forth, in his first address to the Legislature, as the stern advocate 
of supporting the credit of the State at all costs, and as the 
uncompromising opponent of every idea of repudiation. " Lately 
emerged, (said he,) from a bloody and expensive war, a heavy 
debt upon us in consequence of it, — our finances deranged and 



116 THE LIFE AND SERVICES OF JAMES BOWDOIN. 

our credit to reestablish, — it will require time to remove these 
difficulties. The removal of them must be effected in the same 
way a prudent individual, in like circumstances, would adopt, — 
by retrenching unnecessary expenses, adopting a strict economy, 
providing means of lessening his debt, duly paying the interest 
of it, and manifesting to his creditors and the world, that in all 
his transactions he is guided by the principles of honor and 
strict honesty. In this way, and in this only, public credit can 
be maintained or restored ; and when governments, by an unde- 
viating adherence to these principles, shall have firmly established 
it, they will have the satisfaction to see that they can obtain 
loans in preference to all borrowers whatever." 

In this same first address to the General Court, Bowdoin came 
forward, also, as the ardent adviser of an enlargement of the 
powers of the Continental Congress, with a view to the regula- 
tion of commerce with foreign nations. 

" The state of our foreign trade, (said he,) which has given so 
general an uneasiness, and the operation of which, through the 
extravagant importation and use of foreign manufactures, has 
occasioned so large a balance against us, demands a serious con- 
sideration. 

" To satisfy that balance, our money is exported ; which, with 
all the means of remittance at present in our power, falls very 
short of a sufficiency. 

" Those means, which have been greatly lessened by the war, 
are gradually enlarging ; but they cannot soon increase to their 
former amplitude, so long as Britain and other nations continue 
the commercial systems they have adopted since the war. Those 
nations have an undoubted right to regulate their trade with us, 
and to admit into their ports, on their own terms, the vessels and 
cargoes that go from the United States, or to refuse an admit- 
tance ; their own interest or their sense of it, being the only prin- 
ciple to dictate those regulations, where no treaty of commerce 
is subsisting. 

" The United States have the same right, and can, and ought 
to regulate their foreign trade on the same principle ; but it is a 
misfortune, that Congress have not yet been authorized for that 
purpose by all the States. If there be any thing wanting on 



THE LIFE AND SERVICES OF JAMES BO^yDOIN. 117 

the part of this State to complete that authority, it lies with you, 
gentlemen, to bring it forward and mature it ; and, until Con- 
gress shall ordain the necessary regulations, you will please to 
consider what further is needful to be done on our part, to remedy 
the evils of which the merchant, the tradesman, and manufac- 
turer, and indeed every other description of persons among us, 
so justly complain." 

" It is of great importance, (he continues,) and the happiness 
of the United States depends upon it, that Congress should be 
vested with all the powers necessary to preserve the Union, to 
manage the general concerns of it, and secure and promote its 
common interest. That interest, so far as it is dependent on a 
commercial intercourse with foreign nations, the Confederation 
does not sufficiently provide for; and this State, and the United 
States in general, are now experiencing, by the operation of their 
trade with some of these nations, particularly Great Britain, the 
want of such a provision. 

" This matter, Gentlemen, merits your attention ; and if you 
think that Congress should be vested with ampler powers, and 
that special delegates from the States should be convened to 
settle and define them, you will take the necessary measures for 
obtaining such a Convention or Congress, whose agreement, 
when confirmed by the States, would ascertain these powers." 

Thus again did Bowdoin, in 1785, propose as the only mode 
of securing our national prosperity, and counteracting the per- 
nicious efl^ects of the restrictive policy of Great Britain, the same 
remedy which he had declared necessary in 1754, against the 
Cape Breton trade of the French, — a geiieral union of the Colo- 
nies^ with the power of regulating trade. 

His views were not now lost upon those to whom they were 
addressed. The Legislature of the Commonwealth cordially 
responded to them, and passed strong resolutions, bearing date 
July 1, 1785, recommending a Convention of Delegates from all 
the States, for the purpose of revising the articles of Confedera- 
tion, and enlarging the powers of Congress. These resolutions 
were communicated to Congress and the several States. Vir- 
ginia passed similar resolutions in January, 1786 ; in the follow- 
ing September, the first meeting of delegates was held at Anna- 



118 THE LIFE AND SERVICES OF JAMES EOWDOIX. 

polls ; and in May, 1787, the Convention assembled at Phila- 
delphia, by which the Constitution of the United States was 
finally formed. 

The late Mr. Alden Bradford, whose name has so many titles 
to our respectful remembrance, does not hesitate to assert, in his 
History of ^Massachusetts, in view of the facts which I have 
stated, that Governor Bowdoin "is entitled to the honor of 
having first urged the enlargement of the powers of Congress 
for regulating commerce with foreign countries, and for raising 
a revenue from it to support the public credit." 

I need not say how gladly I would vindicate the Bowdoin 
title to this distinction. He who can rightfully claim it, needs 
no other title to the eternal gratiuide of his country. The man, 
upon whose tombstone it may be truly written, — - It was by him 
that the great idea of omr glorious Federal Constitution was 
first conceived, and first urged," — need not envy the proudest 
epitaph in AYestrainster Abbey or the Pantheon. To him the 
rarely interrupted peace, the unparalleled progress and prosperity, 
the firm and cordial union of this mighty nation, for sixty years 
past, and as we hope and believe, for sixty times sixty years to 
come, will bear grateful testimony! To him, the first great 
example of successful Constitutional Republican Government, 
will acknowledge a perpetual debt I Around his memory, the 
hopes of civil liberty throughout the world will weave an unfad- 
ing chaplet I 

Such an honor, however, is too high to be lightly appropriated 
to any one man. I know the danger of setting up pretensions 
of priority in great ideas, whether of state policy, philosophical 
theory, scientific discovery, or mechanical invention. It was 
claimed for Patrick Henry, that he was the first to exclaim, under 
the sting of British oppression in 1774, " We must fight ; '" but 
it has since been clearly proved, that he only echoed the excla- 
mation of Joseph Hawley of ^Massachusetts, communicated to 
him bv John Adams. 

The first public proposal of a General Convention to remodel 
the Confederacy, has been traced by Mr. Madison to one, whose 
family name would thus seem to be associated both with the 
earhest su^sestion, and with the latest and ablest defence of 



THE LIFE AND SERVICES OF JAMES BOWDOIX. 119 

the Constitution, — Pelatiah Webster, — a correspondent and 
friend of Governor Bowdoin, who brought it forward in a 
pamphlet published in 1781. This was followed by resolutions 
in favor of it, passed by the Legislature of New York, on motion 
of General Schuyler, in 1782. Hamilton declared himself in 
favor of the plan, in Congress, in 1783. Richard Henry Lee, 
in a letter to Mr. Madison, urged it in 1784. But no one can 
doubt that the earnest official recommendation of Bowdoin, and 
the strong resolutions of Massachusetts, (then one of the three 
great States of the Confederacy,) in 1785, were most important 
steps in this momentous Federal movement. They preceded, 
by more than a year, the resolutions of Virginia, to which so 
deserved a prominence has always been given, and they should 
not be suffered to be omitted, as thev too often hitherto have 
been, from the history of the rise and progress of the Constitu- 
tion of the United States. 

It;,may be doubted, indeed, whether any one was an earlier or 
more intelligent advocate than Bowdoin, of the great commer- 
cial principle which the Constitution was primarily established 
to vindicate. The necessitv of regulating the trade and navis^a- 
tion of the United States, with a view to counteracting the 
restrictive policy of Great Britain and other nations, and of pro- 
tecting the industry and labor of our own people, was illustrated 
and enforced by him on every occasion. 

Under his auspices, the Legislature of Massachusetts passed 
an act for this purpose on their own responsibility, to cease, of 
course, whenever Congress should be vested with power to take 
the subject under national control. 

Under his advice, an act laying additional duties of import 
and excise was also passed by the State Legislature, in relation 
to which, at the subsequent session, in October, 1785, Governor 
Bowdoin used language in his message, which shows both the 
extent of his information, and the soundness of his views upon 
these commercial subjects : — 

" As one intention of the act (says he) was to encourage our 
own manufactures, by making such a distinction in the duties 
upon them and upon foreign manufactures, as to give, in regard 
to price, a clear preference to the former, you will please to con- 



120 TnE LIFE AND SERVICES OE JAMES BOWDOIN. 

sider, in revising the act, whether that intention be in fact an- 
swered with respect to some of them. I would particularly 
instance in the manufacture of loaf sugar, which, at a time 
when we were under the dominion of Great Britain, was for a 
while very profitably carried on here ; but by the British Parlia- 
ment giving a large bounty on the exportation of it from thence, 
and this with a view of putting a stop to our manufacturing it, 
it was imported here so cheap, as effectually to answer that 
purpose. The bounty, as I am informed, being still continued, 
the duties on each of these manufactures, and on foreign in 
general, should be so regulated, as to give a decided preference 
in favor of our own ; and a like attention should be also had in 
reference to all our manufactures." 

In a message of February 8, 1786, he calls upon the Legis- 
lature to do something for the encouragement of the manufac- 
ture of iron : — 

" Mr. John Noyes, (says he,) who has lately returned bither 
from Europe, was with me a few days ago, and acquainted me 
that while there, he employed the greatest part of his time in 
endeavoring to inform himself in several branches of manufac- 
ture in iron; that he had gained a thorough knowledge of those 
branches ; and that if he and his partner. Colonel Revere, could 
obtain sufficient encouragement from the Legislature, they would 
erect works for carrying them on to some considerable extent; 
that he had, also, a perfect knowledge of the machines used in 
Europe in manufacturing iron and steel, and was well informed 
in the construction and use of the new-invented steam engine, 
very necessary in those operations, and which may be advan- 
tageously employed in many others. 

" In consequence of this conversation, I yesterday received a 
letter from them to tlie same purpose, which, with a letter to me 
from the Hon. Mr. Adams, our Minister in London, recommend- 
ing ]Mr. Noyes and his project of introducing some new manu- 
factures, Avill be communicated to you. 

" Circumstanced as we are at present, it is highly necessary 
we should encourage every useful and practicable manufacture, 
especially that of iron, which, in point of usefulness and prac- 
ticability, may vie with any. 



THE LIFE AND SERVICES OF JAMES BOWDOIN. 121 

"As this manufacture, connected with the proposed improve- 
ments upon it, may be extensively beneficial to the Common- 
wealth, I do with great earnestness recommend the proposal for 
its establishment to your favorable consideration." 

In another of his messages, (21st February, 1786,) he calls the 
attention of the Legislature to the importance of doing some- 
thing for the wool growers and the woollen manufacturers of 
the State : — 

" The extravagant importation of foreign manufactures, (says 
he,) since the conclusion of the war, has greatly injured our 
own, particularly those in wool. 

" The quantity of woollens imported, their superior fabric, 
and the cheapness of them, have not only in a great measure 
put a stop to our looms, and to the several other modes of manu- 
facturing our wool, but have thereby been a principal cause of 
the decrease of sheep in this Commonwealth. This decrease, 
as we are now necessitated to manufacture for ourselves, is uni- 
versally felt and regretted ; and it has become necessary to apply 
some remedy to this evil, which for several years has been a 
growing one. You will, therefore, allow me, gentlemen, to 
recommend to you, to apply some effectual remedy accordingly; 
and at the same time to project some method, by which we may 
obtain models of several machines, or the machines themselves, 
lately invented for manufacturing woollen cloths, by the use of 
which there would be a saving of much labor and expense, and 
the cloth would be manufactured in a superior manner." 

In still another message of the same date, he says, " As the 
encouragement of every useful manufacture in the Common- 
wealth has now become necessary, it is my duty to mention to 
you a very important one, — so important to us as a free and 
indepeiulent people, that our existence as such may depend on 
the establishing it among ourselves ; I mean the manufacture of 
gunpoit'der,^^ 

It is not for me, on this occasion, to discuss the value of what 
has been called " the American System." Nor would I, at any 
time, disturb the laurels of those among the living, to whom its 
paternity has been ascribed. But if any one of later years is 
privileged to wear the title of the father of this system, I think 

11 



/ 



122 THE LIFE AND SERVICES OF JAMES BOWDOIN. 

I may safely assert, upon the evidence which I have now fur- 
nished, the unquestionable claim of Governor Bowdoin to be 
remembered as its grayidfather. 

Certainly, if any one desires to know for what object the 
revisal of the old articles of confederation was demanded by 
at least one of its earliest and most prominent advocates in 
New England ; if any one desires to understand what was the 
original Massachusetts meaning of the constitutional phrase, 
" Congi-ess shall have power to regulate commerce with foreign 
nations ; " he may read it in language which cannot be mis- 
taken, in these messages of Governor Bowdoin. 

There was something, however, of ominous significance in 
his call upon the Legislature at this moment to encourage the 
manufacture of gunpowder. The day was rapidly approaching 
when Massachusetts was about to require a supply of that arti- 
cle for the first time, and, I pray God, for the last time, in her 
history as an independent Commonwealth, for the most deplora*- 
ble of all occasions. 

Bowdoin was reelected to the Chief Magistracy, in April, 
1786, by a very large majority of the popular votes, when he 
again, in his opening address, pressed upon the Legislature the 
paramount importance of making provision for sustaining the 
public credit. Already, however, the discontents at the heavy 
burden of taxation had swollen to a formidable height ; and 
before the close of the year, they had broken out into an open 
insurrection against the legal processes of collection. The 
courts of justice were systematically interrupted in their ses- 
sions, and the insurgents were led along from step to step, until 
they found themselves arrayed in arms against the constituted 
authorities of the State. 

The exigency was, indeed, a momentous one. For the first 
time, and while the cement by which it was held together was 
still green and unhardened, the fabric of our free institutions 
was to be put to the test of a forcible assault. The public 
Credit, the Independence of the Judiciary, the Authority of the 
Executive, the Supremacy of the Laws, the Capacity of the 
People for Self-government, — all, all were at stake. Had 
" Shavs' Rebellion," as itis called, been triumphant, it is hardly 



THE LIFE AND SERVICES OF JAMES BOWDOIN. 123 

possible to exaggerate the danger in which our whole American 
Republican system would have been involved. Had an example 
of successful repudiation at once of debt, of law, and of all 
government, been given at so early a day after our independ- 
ence, and in so leading a commonwealth as Massachusetts, no 
one can tell into what volcanic vortex our whole continent 
would have been plunged, or how far we should have escaped 
the fate of the Spanish colonies at the South, in being the sub- 
ject of one unceasing series of political convulsions and revolu- 
tions. 

Everywhere the faces of the friends of freedom gathered black- 
ness at the prospect. Even Washington could scarcely hold 
fast to the great principle which had never before failed him, 
not to despair of the Republic. In a letter to James Madison, 
of November 6, 1786, he says : — " No morn ever dawned 
more favorably than ours did ; and no day was ever more 
clouded than the present. . . . Without an alteration in 
our political creed, the superstructure we have been seven years 
in raising, at the expense of so much treasure and blood, must 
fall. We are fast verging to anarchy and confusion. 

" A letter which I have received from General Knox, who had 
just returned from Massachusetts, whither he had been sent by 
Congress, in consequence of the commotions in that State, is 
replete with melancholy accounts of the temper and designs of 
a considerable part of the people. Among other things he 
says : ' Their creed is, that the property of the United States 
has been protected from the confiscation of Britain by the joint 
exertions of all, and therefore ought to be the common property 
of all; and he that attempts opposition to this creed, is an ene- 
my to equity and justice, and ought to be swept oil" from the 
face of the earth.' Again, ' they are determined to annihilate 
all debts, public and private, and have agrarian laws, which are 
easily effected by the means of unfunded paper money, which 
shall be a tender in all cases whatever.' . . . How melan- 
choly is the reflection, that in so short a time we should have 
made such large strides towards fulfilling the predictions of our 
transatlantic foes I — ' Leave them to themselves, and their 
government will soon dissolve.' Will not the wise and good 



124 THE LIFE AND SERVICES OF JAMES BOWDOIN. 

strive hard to avert this evil ? Or will their supineness suffer 
ignorance, and the arts of self-interested, designing, disaffected, 
and desperate characters, to involve this great country in wretch- 
edness and contempt ? " 

" It is with the deepest and most heartfelt concern, (writes 
Washington soon after to General Humphreys,) that T perceive, 
by some late paragraphs extracted from the Boston papers, that 
the insurgents of Massachusetts, far from being satisfied with 
the redress offered by their General Court, are still acting in 
open violation of law and government, and have obliged the 
Chief Magistrate, in a decided tone, to call upon the militia of 
the State to support the Constitution. What, gracious God! 
is man, that there should be such inconsistency and perfidious- 
ness in his conduct ? It was but the other day, that we were 
shedding our blood to obtain the Constitutions under which we 
now live, — Constitutions of our own choice and making, — 
and now we are unsheathing the sword to overturn them. The 
thing is so unaccountable, that I hardly know how to realize it, or 
to persuade myself that I am not under the illusion of a dream." 

I misfht cite a hundred other evidences of the alarm which 
this rebellion in Massachusetts excited throughout the Union. 
^Proximus ardet Ucaleg-onJ No one knew whose house would 
catch next, or how soon the whole nation might be involved in 
the flames of civil war. It u^as regarded, like the late rising of 
the Communists and Red Republicans of Paris, as menacing 
the very existence of the system against which it was aimed, and 
as threatening the whole experiment of free government with 
explosion and failure. 

" These combinations, (says Judge Lowell,) were extensive 
and formidable, and perhaps there was a time in which it was 
uncertain, whether even a majority of the people were not at 
least in a disposition not to oppose the progress of insurgency." 
Well did he add, that " Bowdoin was at this time in a situation 
to try the fortitude and resources of any man." 

Among other difficulties with which he had to contend, was 
that of an empty treasury and a prostrate credit. I have myself 
heard the late venerable Jacob Kuhn say, that having occasion 
to buy fuel for the winter session of the Legislature in 1786, 



THE LIFE AND SERVICES OF JAMES BOWDOIN. 125 

and there being no money in hand to pay the bills, he could fmd 
no one who would furnish it on the credit of the Commonwealth, 
and he was obliged to pledge his own personal responsibility for 
the amount I The credit of this humble but honest and patriotic 
Messenger of the General Court was thus better than that of 
the Commonwealth itself! But an appeal was made, where it 
has never been made in vain, to the merchants and other men of 
property of Boston, and was seconded by the liberal example 
of Bowdoin himself, and funds enough were speedily raised, by 
voluntary subscription, for carrying on the measures of defence, 
which had now become necessary for the safety of the State. 
A special session of the Legislature was convened ; the militia 
in all parts of the Commonwealth were called on to hold them- 
selves in readiness for service, and many of them summoned 
at once into the field ; and after a few months of vigilant and 
vigorous exercise of the whole civil and military power which 
the Constitution and the laws intrusted to him, Bowdoin 
had the unspeakable happiness to find Order again esta- 
blished, Peace restored, and Liberty and Law triumphantly 
reconciled. 

He had excellent counsellors about him, and gallant officers 
under him, in this emergency ; and he knew how to employ 
them and trust them. The brave and admirable Benjamin Lin- 
coln, to whom the chief command was assigned, and who, in 
conducting the principal expedition against the insurgents, ga- 
thered fresh laurels for a brow already thickly bound with the 
victorious wreaths of the Revolution ; the gallant John Brooks, 
afterwards the distinguished and popular governor of the State ; 
the chivalrous Cobb, who, being at once chief justice of the 
Bristol courts and commander of the Bristol militia, declared he 
" would sit as a judge, or die as a general ; " the prudent yet 
fearless Shepard ; these, and many more whom the accomplished 
Minot, in his history of the rebellion, has sufficiently designated, 
rendered services on the occasion which will never be forgotten. 
But nobody has ever doubted that, to the lofty principle, the calm 
prudence, the wise discretion, and the indomitable firmness of 
Bowdoin, the result was primarily due, and that his name is en- 
titled to go down in the history of the country, as preeminently 

11' 



12G THE LIFE AND SERVICES OF JAMES BOWDOIN. 

the leader in that first great vindication of Law and Order within 
the limits of our American Republic. 

In the course which he was obliged to pursue, however, for 
this end, cause of offence could hardly fail of being given to 
large masses of the people. An idea, too, extensively prevailed, 
that Bowdoin would be sterner than another in enforcing the 
punishment of the guilty parties, and stricter than another in 
exacting the payment of the taxes still due. During the latter 
part of the year, too, the Legislature had passed a bill reducing 
the Governor's salary ; and Bowdoin, holding this measure to be 
inconsistent at once with the true spirit and with the express 
letter of the Constitution, had not scrupled to veto it. He 
clearly foresaw that this act would conspire with other circum- 
stances in preventing his reelection to the executive chair. He 
resolved, however, not to shrink from the canvass, nobly declar- 
ing, that " his inclination would lead him to retirement, but if it 
should be thought he could be further serviceable to the Com- 
monwealth, he would not desert it." Defendi rempuhlicam ado- 
lescens ; non deseram senex. 

His predictions were realized, and at the next election, Han- 
cock, having accepted a nomination in opposition to him, was 
again chosen Governor of Massachusetts. It would have been 
an ample compensation for any degree of mortification which 
Bowdoin could have felt at this defeat, could he have known, as 
he doubtless did before his death, and as is well understood now, 
that the ratification of the Federal Constitution by the Conven- 
tion of Massachusetts was unquestionably brought about by this 
concession on the part of his political friends to the demands of 
their opponents. He would have counted no sacrifice of himself 
too great to accomplish such a result. 

But Bowdoin was to be permitted to aid in the accomplish- 
ment of that result in a more direct and agreeable manner. 
Once more, and for the last time, he was to be employed in the 
service of the Commonwealth and the Country. A Constitution, 
embodying the great principle of the Regulation of Trade by a 
General Union, was at length framed by the National Conven- 
tion at Philadelphia, and submitted to the adoption of the peo- 
ple. The Massachusetts Convention assembled to consider it 



THE LIFE AND SERVICES OF JAMES EOWDOIN. 127 

in January, 1788. Bowdoin was a delegate from Boston, and 
had the satisfaction of finding his son by his side, as a delegate 
from Dorchester. Both gave their ardent and unhesitating sup- 
port to the new instrument of government, and both made for- 
mal speeches in its favor. 

The elder Bowdoin concluded his remarks with a sentiment, 
which will still strike a chord in every true American heart, — 

" If the Constitution should be finally accepted and established, 
it will complete the temple of American liberty, and, like the 
keystone of a grand and magnificent arch, be the bond of union 
to keep all the parts firm and compacted together. May this 
temple, sacred to liberty and virtue, — sacred to justice, the first 
and greatest political virtue, — and built upon the broad and solid 
foundation of perfect union, — be dissoluble only by the dissolu- 
tion of nature ! and may this Convention have the distinguished 
honor of erecting one of its pillars on that lasting foundation ! " 

It was Bowdoin's happiness to live to see this wish accom- 
plished, to see the Federal Constitution adopted and the Govern- 
ment organized under it, and to welcome beneath his own roof 
his illustrious friend. General Washington, on his visit to Boston 
in 1789, as the First President of the United States. 

He was now, however, a private citizen, and had transferred 
his attention again to those philosophical pursuits, which had 
engaged him in his earliest manhood. Indeed, his interest in 
literature and science had never been suspended. A little vo- 
lume of verses, published anonymously by him in 1759, proves 
that poetry as well as philosophy was an object of his youthful 
homage. He was long connected with the Government of Har- 
vard College, and always manifested the most earnest devotion 
to her welfare. In 1780, he was foremost among the founders 
of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and was their 
President from their first organization to his death. To the 
transactions of the Academy he contributed several elaborate 
Memoirs, in regard to which I borrow the language of the ac- 
complished Lowell, who, at the request of the Academy, pro- 
nounced the eulogy from which I have already repeatedly quoted, 
and who, undoubtedly, gave utterance to the judgment of his 
learned associates. 



128 THE LIFE AND SERVICES OF JAMES BOWDOIN. 

" The first, (says he,) was an ingenious and perspicuous vin- 
dication of Sir Isaac Newton's Theory of Light from objections 
which Dr. Franklin had raised. The two others were also on 
the subject of Light ; and an attempt to account for the manner 
in which the waste of matter in the sun and fixed stars, by the 
constant efllux of light from them, is repaired. 

" These Memoirs (he adds) afford conclusive evidence that 
Mr. Bowdoin was deeply conversant in the principles of natural 
philosophy ; and though the latter memoir suggests a theory 
which may be liable to some objections, yet the novelty of it and 
the ingenious manner in which he has considered it, discovers 
an inquisitive mind, and a boldness of ideas beyond those, who, 
though learned in the knowledge of others, are too feeble to ven- 
ture on new and unexplored paths of science." 

The correspondence between Bowdoin and Franklin on ques- 
tions of science was now renewed, and it will be interesting, I 
am sure, to follow them once more, for a single moment, in some 
of the speculations of their closing years. '• Our ancient corres- 
pondence (says Franklin, in a letter dated 31st May, 1788,) used 
to have something philosophical in it. As you are now free from 
public cares, and I expect to be so in a few months, why may 
we not resume that kind of correspondence ? " And he then 
proceeds to suggest some fifteen or twenty questions, relating 
to magnetism and the theory of the earth, for their mutual con- 
sideration and discussion. Among others, he inquires, " May not 
a magnetic power exist throughout our system, perhaps through 
all systems, so that if a man could make a voyage in the starry 
regions, a compass might be of use ? " 

Bowdoin, in his reply of June 28, 1788, after expressing his 
doubt whether Franklin would even yet be spared from the 
public service, proceeds to say, — "If, however, you choose to 
recede from politics, it will be a happy circumstance in a philo- 
sophical view, as we may expect many advantages to be derived 
from it to science. I have read, (says he,) and repeatedly read, 
your ingenious queries concerning the cause of the earth's mag^ 
netism and polarity, and those relating to the theory of the 
earth. By the former, you seem to suppose that a similar mag- 
netism and polarity may take place, not only throughout the 



THE LIFE AND SERVICES OP JAMES BOWDOIN. 129 

whole solar system, but all other systems, so that a compass 
might be useful, if a voyage in the starry regions were practi- 
cable. I thank you for this noble and highly pleasurable sug- 
gestion, and have already enjoyed it. I have pleased myself 
with the idea that, when we drop this heavy, earth-attracted 
body, we shall assume an ethereal one; and, in some vehicle 
proper for the purpose, perform voyages from planet to planet, 
with the utmost ease and expedition, and with much less uncer- 
tainty than voyages are performed on our ocean from port to 
port. I shall be very happy in making such excursions with 
you, when we shall be better qualified to investigate causes, by 
discerning with more clearness and precision their effects. In 
the mean time, my dear friend, until that happy period arrives, 
I hope your attention to the subject of your queries will be 
productive of discoveries useful and important, such as will 
entitle you to a higher compliment than was paid to Newton 
by Pope, in the character of his Superior Beings ; with this 
difference, however, that it be paid by those Beings themselves." * 

Little dreamed these veteran philosophers and friends, how 
soon the truth of their pleasant theories was to be tested, and 
how almost simultaneously they were indeed about to enter 
upon an excursion to the stars ! On the 17th of April, 1790, 
Franklin died, at the advanced age of eighty-four years. On 
the 6th of November, of the same year, at the earlier age of 
sixty-four years, borne down by the pressure of severe disease, 
Bowdoin followed him to the grave. 

The death of Bowdoin was in admirable keeping with his 
life. " Inspired by religion, (says the obituary of the time,) 
and upheld by the Father of Mercies, he endured a most pain- 
ful sickness with the gi-eatest firmness and patience, and received 
the stroke of death with a calmness, a resignation, and com- 
posure, that marked the truly great and good man." 

He had not contented himself with a life of unstained purity 
and unstinted benevolence ; nor had he postponed the more 
serious preparations for death to the scanty and precarious 

* " Superior Beings, when of late they saw 
A mortal man unfold all nature's law, 
Admir'd such wisdom in an earthly shape, 
And show'd a Newton as we show an ape." 



130 THE LIFE AND SERVICES OF JAMES BOWDOIN. 

opportunities of a last illness. He had embraced the religion 
of the Gospel at an early period of his life, upon studious 
examination and serious conviction. If his philosophic mind 
ever entertained doubts, he strove, and strove successfully, to 
remove them. He has left it upon record, that " Butler's Ana- 
logy " was of the greatest service to him in satisfying his mind 
as to the truths of Christianity. " From the time of my read- 
ing that book, (said he,) I have been an humble follower of the 
blessed Jesus;" and, as the moment of his dissolution drew 
nigh, he expressed his perfect satisfaction and confidence that 
he was " going to the full enjoyment of God and his Redeemer." 

Rarely has the end of a public man in New England been 
marked by evidences of a deeper or more general regret. " Great 
and respectable (we are told) was the concourse which attended 
his funeral; every species of occupation was suspended; all 
ranks and orders of men, the clergy and the laity, the magistrate 
and the citizen, men of leisure and men of business, testified 
their affection and respect by joining in the solemn procession ; 
and crowds of spectators lined the streets through which it 
passed, whilst an uncommon silence and order everywhere 
marked the deepness of their sorrow." ■ 

Such were the becoming tokens of public respect for the 

memory of one who had devoted no less than thirty-six years 

of his life to the service of his Commonwealth and his Country ; 

who had sustained himself in the highest offices of trust and 

responsibility, and in the greatest emergencies of difficulty and 

danger, without fear and without reproach ; and of whom it is 

not too much to say, that he had exhibited himself always the 

very personification of that just and resolute man of the Roman 

poet, whom neither the mandates of a foreign tyarant, nor the 

menaces of domestic rebels, could shake from his established 

principles. 

I " Justum, et tenacem propositi virum 

/ Non civium ardor prava jubentium, 

/ Non viiltus instantis tyranni, 

Mente quatit solidd." 

I can find no other words for summing up his character, than 
the admirable sentence of Judge Lowell : 



THE LIFE AND SERVICES OF JAMES BOWDOIN. 101 

" It may be said that our country has produced many men of 
as much genius; many men of as much learning and knowledge ; 
many of as much zeal for the liberties of their country; and 
many of as great piety and virtue ; but is it not rare indeed, to 
find those in whom they have all combined, and been adorned, 
with his other accomplishments?" 

Governor Bowdoin was early married to Elizabeth Erving, a 
lady of most respectable family and of most estimable qualities, 
who, with their two children, survived him. 

Of his only son, James Bowdoin, I need say nothing in this 
presence and on this spot. He was known elsewhere as a gentle- 
man of liberal education and large fortune, repeatedly a member 
of both branches of the Legislature of Massachusetts, and who 
received from Mr. Jefferson the appointments successively of 
Minister Plenipotentiary, to the Court of Spain, and Associate 
Special Minister with General Armstrong to the Court of France. 
He is known here by other and more enduring memorials. He 
died without children ; but it was only to give new attestation 
to that quaint conceit of Lord Bacon's, — " Surely a man shall 
see the noblest works and foundations have proceeded from 
childless men ; who have sought to express the images of their 
minds, where those of their bodies have failed : so the care of 
posterity is most in them that have no posterity." 

With him the name of Bowdoin, by direct descent in the 
male line, passed away from the annals of New England ; but, 
even had there been no collaterals and kinsfolk worthy to wear, 
and proud to adopt and perpetuate it, the day, the place, the cir- 
cumstances of this occasion, afford ample evidence that it has 
been inscribed where it will not be forgotten. When Anaxagoras 
of Clazomene was asked by the Senate of Lampsacus how they 
should commemorate his services, he replied, " By ordaining 
that the day of my death be annually kept as a holiday in all 
the schools of Lampsacus.' And, certainly, if any man may 
be said to have taken a bond against oblivion, it is he whose 
name is worthily associated with a great institution of education. 
Who shall undertake to assign limits to the duration of the 
memories of Harvard, and Yale, and Bowdoin, and the rest, as 
long as another, and still another generation of young men shall 



132 THE LIFE AND SERVICES OF JAMES BOWDOIN. 

continue to come up to the seats of learning wliich they have 
founded, and to go forth again into the world with a grateful 
sense of their inestimable advantages ? The hero, the statesman, 
the martyr, may be forgotten ; but the name of the Founder of 
a College is written where it shall be remembered and repeated 
to the last syllable of recorded time. Semper — semper honos, 
nomenque tuum, Icmdesque manehunt ! 

' And may I not add, Mr. President and Gentlemen, in con- 
clusion, that the name of Bowdoin is intrinsically worthy to be 
held in such perpetual remembrance? Do not the facts which 
I have thus imperfectly set before you, justify me in saying, with- 
out the fear of being reproached even with a not unnatural par- 
tiality, that there are few names in our country's history, which 
will better bear being held up before the young men of New 
England, as the distinguishing designation of their Alma Mater? 

The mere money which endows a school or a college, is not 
the only or the highest contribution to the cause of education 
or improvement. It may have been acquired by dishonorable 
trade or accursed traffic. It may have been amassed by sordid 
hoardings, or wrung from oppressed dependents. It may carry 
with it to the minds of those for whom it provides, the perni- 
cious idea, that a pecuniary bequest may purchase oblivion for 
a life of injustice and avarice, or secure for the vile and the 
infamous that ever fresh and fragrant renown, which belongs to 
the memory of the just. 

The noblest contribution which any man can make for the 
benefit of posterity is that of a good character. .The richest 
bequest which any man can leave to the youth of his native 
land, is that of a shining, spotless example. 

Let not, then, the ingenuous and pure-hearted young men, 
who are gathered within these walls, imagine that it is only on 
account of the munificence of the younger Bowdoin, that I 
would claim for the name their respect and reverence. Let 
them examine the history of that name through four successive 
generations ; let them follow it from the landing at Casco to the 
endowment of the College ; let them consider the religious con- 
stancy of the humble Huguenot, who sought freedom of con- 
science on the shores of yonder bay ; let them remember the 



THE LIFE AND SERVICES OF JAMES BOWDOIN. 133 

diligence, enterprise, and honesty of the Boston Merchant ; let 
them recall the zeal for science, the devotion to liberty, the love 
for his country, its constitution and its union, — the firmness 
the purity, the piety of the Massachusetts Patriot ; and let them 
add to these the many estimable and eminent qualities which 
adorned the character of their more immediate benefactor ; and 
they will agree with me, and you, Gentlemen, will agree with 
them, that it would be difficult to find a name in our history, 
which, within the same period of time, has furnished a nobler 
succession of examples for their admiration and imitation. And 
neither of you, I am sure, will regret the hour which has now 
been spent, in once more brushing off the dust and mould which 
had begun to gather and thicken upon memories, which, in these 
Halls at least, will never be permitted to perish. 



,'< 



12 



NOTE. 



PROCEEDINGS OF THE LEGISLATURE OF MASSACHUSETTS, 

IN FAVOR OF A CONVENTION TO REVISE THE ARTICLES OF CONFEDERATION. 

[See page 43.] 

Resolve, recommending a Convention of Delegates from all the States, for the purpose 

mentioned, July 1, 178.5. 

As the prosperity and happiness of a nation cannot be secured without a due 
proportion of power lodged in the hands of the Supreme Rulers of the State, 
the present embarrassed situation of our pubUc affairs must lead the mind of 
the most inattentive observer to realize the necessity of a revision of the powers 
vested in the Congress of the United States, by the articles of confederation. 

And as we conceive it to be equally the duty and the privilege of every 
State in the Union, freely to communicate their sentiments to the rest on every 
subject relating to their common Interest, and to solicit their concurrence in 
such measures as the exigency of their public affairs may require : — 

Therefore, Resolved, That It Is the opinion of this Court, that the present 
powers of the Congress of the United States, as contained In the Articles of 
Confederation, are not fully adequate to the great purposes they were originally 
designed to effect. 

Resolved, That it is the ojiinion of this Court, that it is highly expedient, if 
not indispensably necessary, that there should be a convention of delegates from 
all the States in the Union, at some convenient place, as soon as may be, for 
the sole purpose of revising the Confederation, and reporting to Congress how 
far It may be necessary to alter or enlarge the same. 

Resolved, That Congress be, and they are hereby requested to recommend a 
Convention of Delegates from all the States, at such time and place as they may 
think convenient, to revise the Confederation, and to report to Congress how 
far It may be necessary, in tlicir opinion, to alter or enlarge the same, in order 
to secure and perpetuate the primary objects of the Union. 



NOTE. 135 



LETTER TO THE PRESIDENT OF CONGRESS. 

Sir, — Impressed with the importance and necessity of rcvisuig' the powers 
of the United States in Congress assembled, the General Court of the Massachu- 
setts have taken the subject under their serious consideration, and have adopted 
the inclosed resolutions, which you are requested to communicate. Should the 
nature and importance of tlie suliject appear to Congress in the same point of 
light that it docs to this Court, they flatter themselves, that Congress will so far 
endeavor to carry their views into eflfect, as to recommend a Convention of the 
States, at some convenient place, on an early day, that the evils so severely 
experienced from the want of adequate powers in the Federal Government 
may find a remedy as soon as possible. 

As a perfect harmony among the States is an object no less important than 
desirable, the Legislature of the Massachusetts have aimed at that unassuming 
openness of conduct, and respectful attention to the rights of every State in 
the Union, as they doubt not will secure their confidence, and meet the appro- 
bation of Congress. 

A circular letter to the States is herewith transmitted to Congress, which they 
are requested to forward, with their recommendation for a Convention of Dele- 
gates from the States, if they should so far concur in sentiment with the Court, 
as to deem such a recommendation advisable. 



TO THE SUPREME EXECUTIVE OP EACH STATE. 

The unequal footing on which we find ourselves placed by all the powers 
with whom we have any commercial intercourse, has produced consequences too 
extensive not to be universally felt, and too important to be longer neglected. 

As commerce, and our national credit and importance, must decline, unless 
our Representatives in Congress are vested with more efficient powers, we can- 
not doubt of your ready concurrence in measures necessary to accomplish so 
important a purpose. 

We have, by a Resolve of this day, made application to the United States in 
Congress assembled, for such recommendation to the several States as shall be 
thought most conducive to the purposes aforesaid, a copy of which Resolve, with 
the letter inclosing it, addressed to the President of Congress, is herewith trans- 
mitted you. Should you be in sentiment with us, that the measures proposed 
are the proper expedients to relieve us from the national embarrassments we 
labor under, you are requested to signify your approbation of them to Congress, 
as early as possible. 



136 NOTE. 



TO THE DELEGATES OF THIS STATE IX CONGRESS. 

Gentlemex, — You Lave herewith transmitted you, copies of a Resolve of 
the General Court, aecompanied by a letter to the President of Congi'ess, and 
a Circular Letter to the States, upon business of the greatest importance to this, 
as well as every State in the Union, as you will readily perceive by a perusal of 
them. 

You are, therefore, directed to take the earliest opportunity of laying them 
before Congress, and making every exertion in your power to carry the object 
of them into effect, and to give notice to the Governor as early as possible of 
the success of such apjalication. 

Resolved, That his Excellency the Governor be, and he is hereby requested, 
in behalf of the Legislature, to sign the foregoing letter to the President of 
Congress, the Supreme Executive of the several States, and to the Delegates of 
this Commonwealth in Congress, and to forward them accordingly. 



/ 



FREE SCHOOLS AND FREE GOYERNMENTS- 

A LECTURE DELIVERED BEFORE THE BOSTOX LYCEUM, 
DECEMBER 20, 1S3S. 



I HAVE chosen no new topic for the subject of this evening's 
lecture ; nor can I promise you any display of that rare faculty, 
which commands for an old subject new attention and com- 
mends it to fresh embraces, by exhibiting it in unworn robes and 
surrounding it with unwonted illustrations. It is my purpose 
to deal with old truths in the old way, and I must trust to the 
intrinsic importance and universal interest of those truths to 
secure for them a willing and patient attention. 

It cannot fail to have been remarked by every intelligent 
observer of passing events, that the subject of Popular Educa- 
tion has attracted, within a few years past, a much larger share 
of both public and private attention than it formerly enjoyed. 
Evidences of an increased private attention to it may be seen 
in the various Conventions, Associations, and Institutes which 
are meeting daily upon the subject in all parts of the country. 
Proofs of an enlarged public regard for it may be found in the 
recent establishment, by the Legislatures of many of the States, 
of School Funds and Boards of School Commissioners. While 
the still more recent appropriation in our own Commonwealth 
of a considerable sum of money, in connection with the noble 
donation of Mr. Edmund Dwight, to institute the experiment 
of what are called Normal Schools, may be hailed as a cheering 
assurance that private munificence and public liberality are not, 
upon this subject as upon some others, seeking opposite or even 
separate ends, nor have any tendency to counteract or discour- 
age each other, but are ready and resolved to cooperate together 
in promoting this great cause. 



12 * 



138 FREE SCHOOLS AND FREE GOVERNMENTS. 

But it is not only in the United States that a new regard for 
popular education has been recently manifested. In England, 
in France, and in many other parts of Europe, and most of all 
in those parts where least of all we should have expected it and 
last of all looked for it, the education of the people has become 
a matter of the most prominent public and private concern. In 
Prussia, in Austria, and even in Russia, a Free Popular School 
System has been silently springing up, which for completeness 
and efiiciency seems to have had no precedent in time past, and 
certainly has no parallel at the present day; — a system, says 
Professor Stowe of Ohio, " more complete and better adapted to 
develop every faculty of the soul, and to bring into action every 
capability of every kind that may exist even in the poorest cot- 
tage of the most obscure corner of those kingdoms than has ever 
before been imagined." 

Professor Stowe, you may remember, was employed by the 
Legislature of Ohio to procure information upon this subject 
during his recent travels in Europe, and his report, containing 
an interesting account of the Prussian School System, both as 
it exists at home and as already extended to the other countries 
which I have named, was reprinted, by the Legislature of our 
own Commonwealth at their last session, for the information 
of the school teachers and the instruction of the schools of Mas- 
sachusetts. 

Among the many striking occurrences of these wonder-teem- 
ing times, hardly any one seems calculated to make a stronger 
impression upon a reflecting New England mind than this. If 
there has been any thing upon which New Englanders have 
been accustomed to think that they might pardonably pride 
themselves, it has been their Free School System. While others 
have been boasting of the fertility of their soils and the salu- 
brity of their climates, we have been content to be jested 
about our rocks and ice, our east winds and consumptions, 
while we could point to institutions of popular education which 
were admitted to be models for the world. And year after year, 
as our sons and daughters have swarmed out from the old New 
England hive and sought better soils and brighter skies in the 
distant West, we have commended these cherished institutions 



FREE SCHOOLS AND FREE GOVERNMENTS. 139 

to them with our parting tears, and counted it among our most 
precious consolations under the bereavement, that by them and 
in them New England principles would be planted and per- 
petuated thousands of miles over the mountains. How harshly- 
then, does it strike upon our eyes and ears and hearts, to see 
other institutions now sought out as examples, to have other 
schools made the subject of praises so long awarded to ours, 
and to feel that New England will soon be called on to acknowl- 
edge and admire, in the intellectual fields and gardens of our 
country, ' strange leaves and fruits not her own,' — novas frondes 
et non sua poma. Above all, how stern and stoical a philosophy 
does it require, not only to acquiesce in the justice of all this, 
not merely to give the assent of silence to the sentence which 
supersedes us in our most cherished field of competition, but 
even to unite, as we have done, in transferring the very diadem 
of our beauty and our pride to other heads I 

But this view of the circumstance to which I have alluded, 
comprises but a small portion of its impressive character. Had 
the Free School System of New England been obliged to relin- 
quish its claims upon the admiration and imitation of the world 
in favor of similar institutions upon our own American soil, — 
had some thrifty scion of our own raising outshot the parent 
stock, and were it now standing by its side to cast upon it no 
greater disparagement than that of being " the lovely mother of 
a lovelier daughter," — our vanity might have been healed by 
the very blow which wounded it, and we should have been 
compensated for the immediate honors we had lost, by the 
derivative and reflected glory we had acquired. But far dif- 
ferent has been our fate. Robbed of our own richest and 
proudest distinction, we are compelled to see it claimed and 
enjoyed by those, whom we have been accustomed to regard 
with feelings only oscillating between pity and contempt, 
and with whose intellectual, moral, or political condition we 
should have scorned to claim, or even to admit, any connec- 
tion or sympathy. The ignorance and degradation of Prussian 
hirelings, and Austrian bondsmen, and Russian serfs, have so 
long been the theme of our wholesale declamations, and have 
constituted so completely the sum and substance of all our 



140 FREE SCHOOLS AND FREE GOVERNMENTS. 

associations with those regions of the earth respectively, that 
as little should we have expected any good thing out of either 
of them, as an ancient Jew did out of Nazareth, Yet, from 
these very mountains of darkness and valleys of the shadow of 
death, a light has sprung up, of whose rays we are now glad to 
borrow. 

What would our Pilgrim Fathers have thought of it; what 
would the Puritan schoolmasters have said to it ; what would 
the founders and patrons of our schools and colleges, whether 
of the Pilgrim or the Patriot age — the Harvards, the Mathers, 
the Cheevers, and the Lovells — have said, had it been foretold 
to them, that no sooner had the trans- Alleghany region of this 
continent begun to be cleared and settled, and before even the 
first generation of its emigrant population had passed away, it 
should be found turning its eyes to find models for institutions 
of education, — not to the old, time-honored Free Schools of 
New England, which were the scene of their labors and the sub- 
ject of their prayers ; not even to the older and hardly less 
honored academies and colleges of old England, the common 
mother of us all ; — but to institutions for public instruction 
established by the most arbitrary and despotic Governments, and 
among the most benighted and enslaved peoples of Europe,— 
and should be seen actually sending an embassy across the 
ocean to obtain the most accurate and detailed information as 
to their system and discipline ? Would they not almost as 
soon have believed, that the destined dwellers on the banks of 
the Beautiful River, (as the native American well designated the 
Ohio,) would have one day imported in the egg a cargo of 
Hessian flies to feed and fatten on their ripening wheatfields ; or 
that they would have panted themselves to exchange their tem- 
pered and genial climate for " the thrilling regions of thick-ribbed 
ice," which constitute so large a part of the empire of the Czar! 

But there is still another view of the facts to which I have 
referred, which suggests reflections of a far higher and more im- 
portant character than either of those which have yet been 
presented, and which relates not so much to our pride as New 
Englanders, as to our prosperity and welfare as freemen. We 
have been accustomed to regard a free school system as the 



FREE SCHOOLS AND FREE GOVERNMENTS. 141 

chief corner-stone of our Republic, and popular education as 
the only safe and stable basis for popular liberty. So thought 
our fathers before us, and the principle may be found interwoven 
in a thousand forms into the very thread and texture of our 
political institutions. Education, — religious and civil, the 
education of the sanctuary and of the school-house, — was, we 
all know, from the first establishment of these Colonies, a matter 
in regard to which all property was held in common, and every 
man bound to contribute to the necessities of every other man ; 
as much so as personal protection, public justice, or any other of 
the more obvious duties of government, or rights of the go- 
verned. " To this celestial and this earthly light," to use the 
language of Daniel Webster, every man was entitled by the 
fundamental laws, and as a part of that provision for the secu- 
rity of free men and the maintenance of free institutions, which 
it was the purpose of those laws to establish. A conscientious 
scruple of later years, which I am willing to respect in others, 
even if I do not quite feel the force of it myself, has stricken off 
religious education from the pay-roll of the State, and left every 
man not only to consult his own will, but to depend on his own 
means, in seeking for the light celestial. But the terrestrial 
light, the education of the week-day and of the earthly man, 
from which all care of his spiritual nature, it is hoped, is not 
entirely excluded, is still provided at the public cost, and the 
Free Common School system is still cherished as sacredly as 
ever, as the only sure foundation for the Republican fabric. 

How is it, then, that we now find the most arbitrary and 
despotic Governments of the Old World adopting this same 
system as a security for their own stern dominations, and carry- 
ing it into operation at immense expense and upon an unparal- 
leled scale, with as much apparent confidence that it will an- 
swer their own tyrannical ends, as if they were only manning a 
new fleet, or mustering a new standing army ? Have we on 
this side of the waters been all, and all along, mistaken in our 
estimate of the political consequences of popular education ? 
Were our Puritan Fathers led away by erroneous prepossessions, 
which the winds and waves of three thousand miles of wintry 
ocean had not uprooted, or were they only chasing some ig-nis 



142 FREE SCHOOLS AND FllEE GOVERNMENTS. 

fatuus of wilderness origin and growth, when they devoted their 
earliest attention to the establishment of common schools and 
colleges ? Was it a false philosophy, a misguided foresight, a 
deluded sagacity, which led the patriot framers of our State 
Constitution to declare, in the language of John Adams, one of 
the noblest of their number, that ".wisdom and knowledge, as 
well as virtue, diffused generally among the body of the people, 
were necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberties," 
and to make it the constitutional duty " of Legislatures and 
Magistrates, in all future periods of the Commonwealth, to 
cherish the interests of literature and the sciences, and all semi- 
naries of them ? " Have we, from first to last, been harboring 
and cherishins: in our bosoms an insidious and treacherous foe 
to our freedom ? Has an emissary of despotism, in the bor- 
rowed robes of an Angel of Liberty, been admitted unawares 
to our society and entertainment ? Or is Popular Education 
merely neutral and non-committal in its political tendencies, and 
are Free Schools utterly indifferent in their influence upon poli- 
tical institutions ? Will they serve as well, and may they be 
relied on as safely, for the bulwarks of an arbitrary and impe- 
rious dominion, as for the basis of a free Republican govern- 
ment ? Do our enormous annual contributions of time and 
money to the cause of public instruction afford us no new or 
additional guaranty for the progress of free principles, and leave 
our democratic institutions in no less danger of downfall or 
overthrow? And will the hirelings and mercenaries of Aus- 
tria and Prussia muster as promptly, and march as steadily, to 
execute the mandates of individual or of allied monarchs, after 
they have learned to read and write, as they did before ? And 
the Autocrat of all the Russias — will he sit as easy on his 
throne of state, and sway his sceptre as unceremoniously over 
an enlightened, intelligent, and educated people, as he did while 
they were benighted, degraded, and ignorant ? 

I know that but one answer would be given to these ques- 
tions by all whom I address, and I am quite sure that it would 
be the right <inswer. But I cannot help thinking that, in view 
of the events on the other side of the waters to which I have 
referred, not a few of us may be glad to have the faith that is 



FKEE SCHOOLS AND FREE GOVERNMENTS. 143 

in us refreshed, and some of the reasons of that faith newlv im- 
pressed upon our minds, by dwelling for a few moments on the 
pob'tical bearings of Popular Education, and upon the influence 
of Free Schools in establishing and supporting Free Govern- 
ments. 

It has often been remarked, that much apparent difference of 
opinion might be reconciled, and much of angry controversy 
avoided, if men could agree in advance upon the meaning and 
definition of the terms, which are employed to designate the 
subject matter in debate. And we daily observe discussions, 
which commenced with a formidable array of most opposite 
and conflicting principles, gradually dwindling down into a mere 
dispute about words, and ending in an appeal to the last edition 
of Walker's or Webster's Dictionary. Let me, then, so far 
provide against any controversy which might originate in a 
mere disagreement about words, as to state explicitly at the 
outset my understanding of the phrases, Popular Education and 
Free Government; and if, in doing so, I shall seem to have 
settled the whole question, the patience of my hearers Avill be 
the sooner relieved. 

In attempting to describe Popular Education, I am not about 
to discuss systems of education. I have no new-fangled theo- 
ries to advance as to the age at which education should com- 
mence, the mode in which it should be pursued, or the matters 
with which it should deal. The education to which I refer, it is 
never too early, and never entirely too late, to commence, and 
towards it there is neither royal road nor railroad which can 
claim a monopoly of the travel. It is not classical learning. 
It is not scientific acquirement. It is not a knowledge of dead 
languages or of living. " Though a linguist (says John Milton) 
should pride himself to have all the tongues which Babel cleft 
the world into, yet if he have not studied the solid things in 
them, as well as the words and the lexicons, he were nothing so 
much to be esteemed a learned man, as any yeoman or trades- 
man competently wise in his mother dialect only." But it is 
not the study of these solid things either, which constitutes the 
education which I have in my mind. It is not the science of 
elements, any more than of alphabets. It is not the knowledge 



144 FREE SCHOOLS AND FREE GOVERNMENTS. 

of the materials of the earth, the powers of the air, or the mo- 
tions of the stars. In reference to the education of which I speak, 

" Those earthly godfathers of heaven's lights 
That give a name to every fixed star, 
Have no more profit of their shining nights 
Than those that walk and wot not what they are." 

Let me not seem to speak lightly of the study of languages 
or the science of astronomy. The power and presence of the 
Spirit of Truth were once attested by the possession of tongues ; 
and it is an attribute to God himself that " he telleth the number 
of the stars, and calleth them all by their names." I desire only 
to convey in the most emphatic manner the idea, that in speak- 
ing of education, I refer not to modes, but to results ; not to 
instruments, but to operations; not to ways, but to ends. 
Reading and writing are excellent accomplishments ; but the 
time has gone by when they could save a man's neck from the 
gallows ; and they never did, and never can, establish or maintain 
the life and liberty of a nation. The ancient languages are 
golden keys for unlocking the stores of wit and eloquence and 
poesy ; but evil spirits have long since refused to be exorcised by 
a sentence of Latin, and the words of life may as certainly be 
found in a vernacular Testament, or even in John Eliot's Indian 
version, as if they were hunted for in the original Greek, or in 
the Complutensian Polyglott itself. A man's memory may be 
tasked and strained till it becomes a perfect encyclopaedia, hav- 
ing the whole circle of science in its grasp, paged and indexed 
for use. A man's fancy may be chafed and charged till it will 
sparkle and lighten of its own mere exuberance and inconti- 
nency. A man's observation may be quickened and informed 
till it can read and translate at sight every sign and character 
and composition of Nature and of Art. And beautiful ornaments 
to a true education do such faculties form in himself, and pow- 
erful aids in imparting a true education to others. But they 
neither constitute that education, nor are necessary either to its 
attainment or communication. Wretched, indeed, would be the 
lot of the every-day man, if his happiness, his advancement, his 
liberty, depended on powers like these. The doctrine that would 



FREE SCHOOLS AND FREE GOVERNMENTS. 145 

make his enjoyment of freedom conditional upon such acquisi- 
tions, would doom the daily laborer for his daily bread to perpe- 
tual servitude. 

Such then, certainly, is not that popular education whose in- 
fluence upon Free Governments I proposed to consider. No ; I 
speak not of the attainment of positive knowledge, but of the 
preparation of negative faculties, — not of the introduction and 
inculcation of any thing that is without a man, but of the deve- 
lopment and expansion of what is within a man, and within every 
man. I speak of education as distinguished from instruction. 
Instruction is the communication of knowledge. Education is 
the formation of the mind, the regulation of the heart, the esta- 
blishment of the principles, the educing or drawing out and 
training up of the whole moral and intellectual nature of man. 
I speak of intelligence, — whether sharpened by the observation 
of signs or of things signified, of sounds or of substances. I 
speak of judgment, — whether disciplined in the school of an ab- 
stract philosophy, or rectified by the standard of a practical expe- 
rience. I speak of passions, — not crushed and eradicated — 
God never planted such mighty impulses within us to be plucked 
up and thrown away — but controlled and directed ; — of pas- 
sions, not paralyzed and deadened, but purged of their cor- 
rupt fires and lawless lusts, and quickened to the scent and the 
pursuit of purity and truth; — of passions, not hunted down and 
destroyed like beasts of prey, but reclaimed from their wild na- 
ture, tamed, broken, and harnessed to the car of Virtue and the 
Graces. I speak of conscience, — not abandoned to accidental 
promptings, occasional twinges, wayward and capricious im- 
pulses, and made the plea, if not the pretence, of all sorts of 
whimsical opinions and extravagant acts ; but instructed, in- 
formed, enlightened by human reason and divine revelation, until 
it can no longer be confounded with an obstinate prepossession 
or a blind self-will, and then excited and stimulated to a vigilant 
and constant monitorship ; — of conscience, not left in the dim, 
deceptive twilight in which it first reveals itself to the human 
breast, betokening rather the approach, than the presence, of a 
Divine Day within us ; but saluted, cherished, worshipped, and 
ushered up, until it has advanced from an unrisen to a meridian 

13 



146 FREE SCnOOLS AND FREE GOVERNMENTS. 

and never-setting luminary. Or rather I speak of all these facul- 
ties united and harmonized, the intelligence furnishing materials 
for the judgment, and the passions supplying a stimulus to the 
intelligence, and the judgment, the passions, and the intelli- 
gence, alike and together, all brought to the service, submitted 
to the control, and doing homage to the supremacy of a pure and 
enlightened conscience. Place powers, thus combined, thus 
proportioned, and in this state of cooperation, into a sound and 
healthy frame, and you have a true education personified. 
Such a man may speak many languages with fluency, or only 
his own with hesitation ; his talk may be of bullocks or of the 
Great Bear ; his hand may direct a pen or wield a sledge-ham- 
mer; his occupation and his outward show may be as high and 
glaring, or as humble and unostentatious as may be ; still, in the 
best sense of the term, he will be an educated man. He will be 
a good man. He will be a good citizen ; — prepared to under- 
stand his own rights and maintain them, — to understand other 
people's rights and respect them, — to understand his own duties 
and discharge them, whether to his country or his God, his neigh- 
bor or himself. Above all, he will have acquired that indispen- 
sable qualification for any participation in that great work of 
governing the State, which liberty imposes on every free citizen, 
— the ability to govern himself. 

And this power of intelligent, individual, self-government, I 
regard, in one word, as the best result and noblest achievement 
of all true education. An intelligent, individual self-government, 
implying, as it clearly does in its most liberal interpretation, not 
merely a passive restraint upon whatever dispositions for doing 
evil, but also an active exercise of whatever faculties for doing 
good, the poorest or the wealthiest in either temporal possessions 
or intellectual powers may possess; — comprehending industry 
as well as temperance, beneficence as well as benevolence, self- 
devotion as well as self-denial; — this is the right aim, and, 
what is better, the certain end, of all true popular education. I 
leave to others to decide by what particular systems the greatest 
amount of this sort of education may be disseminated ; but it is 
a consoling reflection, amid the diversity of opinions on this 
point, that it is the tendency of almost all conceivable systems 



FREE SCHOOLS AND FREE GOVERNMENTS. 147 

to produce some amount of it. Certainly, if there be any study 
or any science which has no tendency to produce this result, it 
is unworthy to be counted among the instruments or even the 
ornaments of a republican Free School. Of popular education, 
and especially of popular education in a free country, we may 
well adopt the language of Lord Bolingbroke, — "An applica- 
tion to any study that tends neither directly nor indirectly to 
make us better men and better citizens, is at best but a specious 
and ingenious sort of idleness, and the knowledge we acquire 
by it is a creditable kind of ignorance, nothing more." 

But I am in some degree anticipating remarks which belong 
to a different part of my argument, and I turn now to the other 
phrase of which I proposed to attempt some definition or analy- 
sis, — Free Government. If I mistake not, this expression is 
ordinarily employed to signify little else but a government in 
which the people possess, directly or indirectly, the supreme 
power. But I believe something more will be found necessary, 
in order to give the definition that completeness and exactness 
which may adapt it to any purposes of argument. Indeed, 
strictly considered, I doubt if it may not be said that the people 
always and everywhere possess the supreme power. In the 
lowest depths of African bondage, under the sternest sway of 
Asiatic despotism, the people, in one sense at least, though it 
seems a mockery to say so, still possess the power. Wherever 
the numerical strength and physical force of a nation is, whether 
its nominal government be that of an Autocrat, an Oligarchy, 
or a Democracy, there is alike the real supremacy. The im- 
mense standing armies which are so carefully clustered around 
administrations of an arbitrary sort, are a most significant attest- 
ation of this truth. Their glistening and ever-pointed bayonets 
tell always of a power above and beyond the existing adminis- 
tration, imperious and omnipotent as it may vaunt itself, of 
which that administration stands in constant awe, and against 
which it deems it prudent to maintain a watchful preparation. 
And even those standing armies themselves, what are they, 
after all, but the people themselves, or certainly vast masses of 
the people, and many times vast majorities of the people, either 
by rotation or simultaneously, manifesting their own power, 



148 FREE SCHOOLS AND FREE GOVERNMENTS. 

signalizing their own supremacy, and proclaiming, under the 
stimulus of an actual pay or an anticipated plunder, their sove- 
reign will and pleasure that the government should be admi- 
nistered through the medium of the powers that be, and their 
willingness to do watch and ward in their support? The truth 
would seem to be, that political power must be always held 
either by, or at the will of, physical power ; and, paradoxical 
though it may sound, the people, actively or passively, by posi- 
tive administration or negative acquiescence, by consent ex- 
pressed or the silence which implies it, are everywhere supreme. 
The mere possession of power by the people, therefore, cannot 
of itself comprehend the true idea of Free Government. 

Nor (quitting, perhaps, too nice and refined an abstraction,) 
does an active assertion and positive exercise of power by 
the people necessarily constitute a Free Government. I have 
already illustrated this position, in part, by the instance of 
standing armies. But other illustrations may be found more 
congenial to our own political condition. The people of this 
Union, when they first fought themselves free from a foreign 
yoke, and assembled in their own unlimited sovereignty to frame 
a government for themselves, might have adopted, had they 
been inclined, a Constitution providing for an hereditary mo- 
narchy and a privileged nobility, as well as for an elective Pre- 
sident and Senate. They might have placed the Trial by Jury 
and the Habeas Corpus, the Liberty of Speech and the Freedom 
of the Press, at the disposal of a single absolute will, as well as 
have guarded and guaranteed them each forever against all vio- 
lation or infringement. And such a Constitution would have 
been no less an exercise of sovereign power by the American 
people, than that which they actually did adopt. 

And even that which they did adopt, — the best which the 
world has ever seen, and which will be held up through all times 
and climes as the great original Proofsheet and Prototype of 
Free Constitutions, — who yet does not know that even under 
that Constitution oppressions may be practised, tyrannies perpe- 
trated, freedom violated ? Yes — a people whose first principle 
of association it is that all men are born free and equal, and 
who follow up that principle by holding all power in their own 



FREE SCHOOLS AND FREE GOVERNMENTS. 149 

hands, and administering their affairs through their own freely 
and frequently elected Representatives, — even such a people may 
yet fail, utterly fail, of fulfilhng the true and perfect notion 
of a Free Government. It is a natural and necessary incident 
to such a condition that the will of the greater number should 
prevail, or, in other words, that a majority should rule. And it 
is a plain corollary to this position, that this majority, whenever 
they may chance to be provoked or tempted, may domineer and 
tyrannize over the minority. It has even been sometimes as- 
serted that greater pubhc wrongs may be, and have actually 
been, in this very way, committed, and greater pieces of tyranny 
perpetrated, under the name and forms of Free Government, 
than under any other political name or form whatever. I by no 
means admit that such is the legitimate result of these forms. 
But no forms can ever constitute complete securities for the 
existence or enjoyment of liberty. Established Constitutions 
and written Laws, mast doubtless be regarded as a great ad- 
vance in the progress of human freedom, when compared with 
the changing and capricious mandates of one or of many. But 
written laws are no substitute and no synonyme for just, and 
good, and equal laws. The first written laws of the ancient 
Jews, were the laws of God. But the first written laws of the 
ancient Greeks, were the laws of Draco. And from those days 
to these, laws have continued to be written at one time with a 
ray from Heaven, and at another with a finger of blood. It is, 
in short, both proved by experience, and plain enough to be per- 
ceived without any proof, that a majority may be arbitrary and 
tyrannical, both in making and in breaking laws, as well as 
an individual ; and that a multitude, either in spite of, or it may 
be through the medium of, the best and freest forms and laws 
which can be contrived or executed, may as easily, and even more 
securely, wreak upon those within its control the impulses of 
its ignorance, its wilfulness, or its wickedness, as one or a few. 
And here, if I mistake not, we have arrived at the precise 
consideration which must be attended to in obtaining a com- 
plete idea of Free Government. These arbitrary and tyrannical 
propensities must be controlled and quelled, and this ignorance, 
wilfulness, wickedness, from which they spring, must be enhght- 

13* 



150 PREE SCHOOLS AND FREE GOVERNMENTS. 

ened, restrained, and subdued, or Free Government cannot 
exist. The full idea of a Free Government, in other words, 
requires, not merely that power should be in the hands of the 
people, but that it should be in the hands of a moral, intelligent, 
and virtuous people. It requires not merely that a people should 
govern themselves, in the sense in which that phrase is generally 
used and understood, — in the sense, namely, of a majority go- 
verning the whole, — but that each and every one of the people 
should govern himself. Self-government, in one word, in its 
whole meaning, in both its senses, in its application to society 
as a mass, and to the individuals who are its members, is an 
essential element in any true and perfect definition of frae go- 
vernment. In its latter, and least regarded application, more 
especially, it constitutes a paramount portion, a predominating 
ingredient of such a definition. Individual self-government, — 
the possession of power, and the exercise of power by man over 
himself — by intellect and conscience over mere appetite and 
passion, — this it is, and this alone, which can convert a merely 
popular government into a really Free Government; and this 
alone which can impart substance, vitality, solidity, to that 
liberty which otherwise is but a name and a form. 

One of the operations of an intelligent, individual self-govern- 
ment towards this end, by chastening and disciplining those 
propensities which so often lead a majority to abuse the pleni- 
tude of their power to the oppression of the minority, I have 
just suggested. But its influence is even more important in 
another way, — I mean in removing the necessity of many laws 
which must otherwise be enacted, and in forming a substitute 
for much of what is ordinarily meant by government, which 
must otherwise be exercised. I would not be thought to imply 
by this remark that any complete and perfect substitute for civil 
government would be created, even were self-government in 
every person carried to the highest practicable extent. I have 
no belief that what is fashionably termed moral suasion, were 
it even successful in finding a hold upon every heart in the com- 
munity, could abolish all occasion for the formal enactment, or 
even for the forcible execution of laws. I might even be dis- 
posed to dissent from the doctrine of Mr. Madison in the Fede- 



FREE SCHOOLS AND FREE GOVERNMENTS. 151 

ralist — that "if all men were angels, no government would be 
necessary." Certainly while men are merely mortals, more or 
less of what is called government, organized and administered 
in some form or other, will be found indispensable to the exist- 
ence of any thing like civilized society. Every association of 
men, in order to maintain itself a moment, must establish some 
rules of membership, and must lodge somewhere or other a 
power to enforce those rules when disregarded ; and this consti- 
tutes the whole idea of government. Free Government, then, 
is not to be confounded with freedom from government, nor 
have they any thing in common either in their nature or results. 
But as little is Free Government to be confounded with mere 
free forms of government. The quality and still more the 
quantity of the power which is exercised over any people, has 
quite as much influence in characterizing that people as a free 
people, as the source from which that power ultimately emanates, 
or the hands by which it is immediately wielded. Too much 
government has, if I mistake not, been one of the chief poli- 
tical curses of the world from the earliest ages, and it is indeed 
but another name, but a slight circunalocution for tyranny itself. 
"Mark, then. Judges and Lawgivers," — says nobly a great 
English writer whom I have before quoted, and so much of 
whose prose writings is worthy of being bound up in the same 
volume with his immortal epic — " Mark, then, Judges and Law- 
givers, and ye whose office it is to be our teachers, for I will 
utter now a doctrine if ever any other, though neglected or not 
understood, yet of great and powerful importance to the govern- 
ment of mankind. He who wisely would restrain the reason- 
able soul of man within due bounds, must first himself know 
perfectly how far the territory and dominion extends of true and 
honest Liberty. As little must he offer to bind that which God 
hath loosened, as to loosen that which He hath bound. The 
ignorance and mistake of this high point hath heaped up one 
huge half of all the misery that hath been since Adam." 

It is a difficult task which Milton has here prescribed to the 
Civil Lawgiver, and one which not even his own divine genius 
and searching spirit has given us the means of fulfilling. The 
territory of true and honest Liberty has always been, and seems 



152 FREE SCHOOLS AND FREE GOVERNMENTS. 

always destined to be, a disputed territory, and its metes and 
bounds can neither be settled by ancient treaties nor modern arbi- 
trations. As well might we take the Periplus of Hanno for the 
real circumnavigation of the earth, or the observations of a 
Chaldee shepherd for a complete catalogue of the heavens, as 
think to run out the landmarks of true and honest Liberty at 
the present day by the chains and stakes of a past age. Since 
Ultima Thule and Land's End were dotted down on the old 
charts of Freedom, a whole new hemisphere has been disco- 
vered. And where the ancient gazer at the heavens saw only 
the blended radiance of a " milky way," the modern political 
astronomer beholds myriads of distinct and full-orbed stars. 
Exploring expeditions, too, are ever traversing the globe, and 
telescopes ever pointed to the skies, which, though they may 
sometimes bring us back reports of floating islands, sunk as 
soon as seen, or mountains in the moon, are not unfrequently 
discovering new points of land, new passages of sea, and new 
lights in the firmament of Freedom. The principles of true and 
honest Liberty are indeed one and the same now and forever; 
and I am by no means sure that they were not as well under- 
stood by some of the philosophers and patriots of past days, as 
they are now or ever will be. But in the application of these 
principles to particular countries and conditions, a steady ad- 
vance has been, is still, and, I hope and believe, is always des- 
tined to be going on. That which was the whole territory of 
true and honest Liberty a century ago, is now but a narrow 
corner of its possessions, and its boundaries are still spreading 
and spreading like those of the horizon itself to eyes of greater 
and greater elevations. 

It is no part of my purpose, on this occasion, to give even my 
own view of the real reach or rightful dimensions of this still 
vexed territory, much less to volunteer a limit and circumscrip- 
tion for the view of others. These two propositions only I must 
advance and insist on, and they are at once evident enough to 
secure an instant assent, and ample enough to sustain the whole 
argument in which I am engaged. First, that true and honest 
Liberty in any age or country is nothing less than the largest 
extent, the highest degree, the widest enjoyment, the securest 



FREE SCHOOLS AISTD FREE GOVERNMENTS. 153 

possession of liberty, which is compatible with that amount of 
compulsory restraint which the maintenance of the social system 
or body politic imperatively requires; — and second, that the 
amount of this compulsory restraint which the social system 
will require for its preservation in any particular community, in 
the way of civil government, will be precisely proportioned to 
. the amount of voluntary restraint which the individual members 
of that community impose upon themselves, in the way of self- 
government. 

In practical conformity with these two propositions, we shall 
find, that the freer the institutions of government in any coun- 
try are, the more do they presuppose the existence, and appeal 
to the exercise, of an intelligent and rational self-control among 
the citizens. And many of the operations of advancing free- 
dom, which seem at first to have consisted in abolishing checks 
and breaking chains, will be discovered only to have changed 
the powers by which those checks must be applied, and to have 
transmuted the material of which those chains must be com- 
posed. Thus, in dispensing with the hourly presence and per- 
petual patrol of a standing army in our own American streets, 
than which nothing forms to a foreign eye a more impressive 
evidence, and hardly any thing to our own apprehension a more 
important element, of the freedom of our government, — it is 
certainly not intended to be implied, that brawls and riots and 
mobs are the rightful privileges of a republican people. Nor in 
abolishing all censorship of the press, and removing all restric- 
tions upon the freedom of speech, is it designed to sanction the 
inference, that an unbridled indulgence in ribaldry, defamation, 
and blasphemy, constitute any part of the prerogative of a free 
citizen. No ; in these and a thousand other cases which might 
be suggested, nothing is implied but that confidence in the intel- 
ligent and virtuous self-control of the people, which is one of the 
peculiar and most prominent characteristics of a Free Govern- 
ment. And whenever, in any particular case, this confidence 
in the voluntary abstinence of the people from the abuse of the 
liberties which they enjoy, is found to be misplaced, we rarely 
fail to see it followed by a resort to fresh restrictions of a com- 
pulsory character, by which the very use and existence of those 
liberties is curtailed or suspended. 



154 FREE SCHOOLS AND FREE GOVERNMENTS. 

It is not, I fear, enough considered, how great an influence 
may be exerted by the conduct and character of individual men, 
in determining the nature of the government which it may be 
practicable for any community to maintain, and the amount of 
freedom which it shall be in their power to enjoy ; and how a 
few unprincipled and wilful persons, in any society, may render 
expedient and even necessary the adoption of new measures. 
and the exercise of new powers of government, by which secu- 
rity can only be purchased at the cost of liberty. A handful 
of thoughtless or violent men, for instance, become engaged in 
a brawl. A multitude is attracted to the scene. Spectators are 
soon turned into actors. The unarmed ministers of the law are 
outnumbered and overpowered. Military force is called for and 
comes. The sternest and most summary justice is demanded 
and executed. Indictment, trial, verdict, juries, judges, witnesses, 
all the forms of law, all the guards of liberty, are sacrificed 
to the exigencies of the hour, and that worst of tyrannies, a 
martial domination, supplants, for a longer or shorter time, the 
mild and equal magistracy of the civil ruler ; — and perhaps, 
after a few repetitions of the scene, a standing army begins 
to be thought necessary for the preservation of domestic peace. 
Or it may be that a single reckless or rapacious individual un- 
dertakes to fire the dwellings or pillage the property of a town 
or city. Prowling at midnight, he prosecutes his nefarious de- 
signs with an impunity and a success which rob every couch 
of rest and fright every eye from sleep, until a strict and disci- 
plined patrol is organized, and the "all's well" of the peaceful 
watchman gives place to the " stand, who 's there ? " of an im- 
perious and insolent gendarme. 

Common-place instances are these, I fear, even to a New Eng- 
land apprehension, of the power of one or a few, by violating 
that great duty of self-government, which constitutes so essential 
an auxiliary to a free civil government, not merely to disturb the 
peace of society for the moment, but to derange the whole poli- 
tical system, to diminish the public liberty, and to force their 
fellow-men in mere self-defence into the adoj)tion of arbitrary 
and despotic institutions. 

I may sum up this head of my remarks in the fine language 



FREE SCHOOLS AND PREE GOVERNMENTS. 155 

of Mr. Burke — " Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact pro- 
portion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own 
appetites ; in proportion as their love to justice is above their 
rapacity ; in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of under- 
standing is above their vanity and presumption ; in proportion 
as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise 
and good in preference to the flattery of knaves. Society can- 
not exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be 
placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more 
there must be without. It is ordained, in the eternal constitution 
of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their 
passions forge their fetters." Or, if I may be borne with in bor- 
rowing again from a Bard, to whom I am already so much 
indebted, I may express the same ideas in other phraseology, — 

True Liberty 
■ always with riglit reason dwells 



Twinn 'd, and from her hath no dividual being ; 

Reason in man obscured, or not obeyed, 

Immediately inordinate desires 

And upstart passions catch the government 

From reason, and to servitude reduce 

Man till then free." 

If I have not thus far occupied your attention to no purpose, 
but a moment more will be required to bring together the two 
terms, of which I have thus attempted some description and 
analysis, and to exhibit their mutual relation and reciprocal 
influence. I have stated the highest end and best operation of 
a true popular education to be the endowment of the individual 
man with the power, and his instruction in the exercise, of a 
conscientious, intelligent, enlightened self-government ; — and I 
have endeavored to show that this conscientious, intelligent, 
enlightened, self-government constitutes the whole basis, and 
much of the superstructure also, of what is properly understood 
by a free civil government ; and I need hardly say that it is no 
strained deduction or far-fetched inference, but an immediate 
and irresistible conclusion, from these premises, that the cause 
©f a true Popular Education and the cause of Free Government 
are substantially one and the same cause, and that whoever and 



156 FREE SCHOOLS AND FREE GOVERNMENTS. 

whatever promotes and advances the one, by the same influence 
or the same effort promotes and advances the other. 

But I may perhaps here be told, that I have rather stated 
what education ought to be, than what it is, and that however 
the Free Schools of America may propose as their ultimate object, 
that discipline of the moral and intellectual man which may 
best adapt him to the maintenance and enjoyment of liberty, it 
is not to be imagined, much less assumed, that the Free Schools 
of Prussia, Austria, and Russia, will pursue a course so directly 
calculated to overthrow the very governments by which they 
were originally instituted and are still supported and controlled. 
I will not undertake to determine how far this objection is 
founded on a just estimate of the designs of those to whom it 
relates, but prefer granting it at once all the force which it can 
possibly possess in this respect. Nicholas and Ferdinand and Fre- 
deric AYilliam may have established and endowed their schools 
and colleges in whatever arbitrary whim or tyrannical tem- 
per may be conceived of. They may still propose to themselves 
no other end, in these institutions, than that of fortifying their 
own prerogative and perpetuating their own dominion, and may 
strive to adapt their whole system of education to the single 
purpose of teaching their subjects greater loyalty and their slaves 
more submission. So Satan, " upon the tree of life, devising 
death, sat like a cormorant." But fortunately it is neither in 
the power of man nor devil to control events, nor is it in the 
mouth of either to bespeak results corresponding to their designs 
and contrivances. That branch of education is yet to be dis- 
covered, that mode of teaching still to be invented, that class 
of studies still to be evoked from chaos, which can be turned to 
any purpose of tyranny. You cannot educate men to be slaves. 
It is only by withholding education from them that you can 
make or keep them so. ' You cannot teach the human mind 
that its legitimate condition is one of submission and servitude. 
It is only from the want of a teacher that it has ever fallen into 
that condition. Whatever difierence of opinion there may be 
as to the system of education which is best fitted for the esta- 
blishment and maintenance of free government, there is no sys- 
tem, — none so narrow, none so arbitrary, none so purposely per- 



FREE. SCHOOLS AND FKEE GOVERNMENTS. 157 

verse and crooked, — which is not in some degree adapted to this 
end. The eye that is only opened to gaze upon midnight sees 
a world more than that which is wholly shut. Light is its 
natural element, and that light it will seek and fmd wherever 
a ray is gleaming through the darkness ; and the brilliancy and 
the beauty of that single ray, enhanced by the very gloom with 
which it is surrounded, will make it look and long for another 
and another, and will prepare it to hail from the mountain top 
of an eager expectation the first blush or break of dawn. So 
is it with the mind of man. Touch it, awaken it, agitate it, 
open it, and though it be only to perceive the darkest forms of 
tyrannical oppression, and to ponder upon the most unqualified 
doctrines of arbitrary and absolute power, liberty is still its ele- 
ment, and the love of liberty its instinct, and it will never cease 
to strive and struggle on till that love is gratified and that ele- 
ment gained. No, it is only in exile that Dionysius can safely 
turn schoolmaster. Education can never be converted into an 
engine of despotism, and the engineer who essays to use it so, 
will find himself " hoist with his own petard." The giant ener- 
gies of the human intellect, while loaded with the chains and 
immured in the prisonhouse of ignorance, may toil and grind for 
the lords of the earth, as patiently as Samson at the mill of 
Gaza ; but once unfetter them and lead them forth, and, though 
it be for no better end than to subserve the glory or minister to 
the sport of those who have summoned them, they will vindi- 
cate their own dignity, they will manifest their own might, they 
will assert their own title to freedom, even if it be only to fail- 
themselves at the last, crushed beneath the same ruins with 
which they have overwhelmed their oppressors ! 

But while I indulge in these expressions of seeming defiance, 
I am unwilling to leave the impression that I entertain any 
belief, that institutions of education have been established in 
Europe with any such views as those which have been supposed, 
or that the system which has been introduced there has been 
designedly framed to obstruct rather than advance the progress 
of freedom. The very general favor which that system has met 
with in our own country, and the trouble and expense with 
which its details have been procured and published, are an 
ample answer to any such idea. 

14 



158 FREE SCHOOLS AND FREE GOVERNMENTS. 

Nor can the operation of this system upon the condition of 
the Old World be in any degree doubtful. Silent and gradual, 
perhaps, but certain and thorough, will be the revolution it will 
effect. Its progress may not be tracked in blood, nor its arrival 
at the successive stages of its course be heralded by a noise of 
battle. Its achievements may not be manifested by proscrip- 
tions and confiscations, nor its victories signalized either by the 
beheading of Kings, or the denial and defiance of the King of 
Kings. It is, indeed, one of the most cheering hopes, let me 
rather say, one of the most glorious assurances, which the esta- 
blishment of the Free School system in Europe has inspired us 
with, that that advancement of human happiness and human 
liberty, which seems almost as much a Divine law, as the pre- 
cession of the equinoxes, or the procession of the seasons, is not 
doomed to be brought about in time to come, as it so generally 
has been in time past, by mere violence and bloodshed. It was 
well said by Baron Cuvier, who distinguished himself almost 
as highly in France by his eflbrts in the cause of education, as 
he did in the world at large by his triumphs in the field of sci- 
ence : " Give schools before political rights ; make citizens com- 
prehend the duties that the state of society imposes on them ; 
teach them what are political rights before you offer them for 
enjoyment ; then all meliorations will be made without causing 
a shock ; then each new idea, thrown upon good ground, will 
have time to germinate, to grow and to ripen, without convuls- 
ing the social body." And the great comparative anatomist 
need hardly have quitted his own peculiar province of research 
to learn and to illustrate this position. He had only to com- 
pare the millions of human bones with which the French Revo- 
lution strewed and almost covered the earth, with the few thou- 
sands which were thinly scattered over the battle-fields of our 
own land, and the conclusion was inevitable. By rescuing man 
from the yoke of ignorance and prejudice, as well as from the 
dominion of arbitrary political power ; by delivering him from 
the bondage of tyrant passions as well as of tyrant princes ; 
by supplying the check of an enlightened conscience wherever 
one of legal compulsion is removed, and substituting a sense of 
moral obligation wherever a political chain is broken, — the Free 



FREE SCHOOLS AND FREE GOVERNMENTS. 159 

School system, it cannot be doubted, will ultimately prevent the 
recurrence of those frightful periods of anarchy and uproar, those 
reigns of terror, which have so often formed the transition state, 
the middle passage, between servitude and freedom. And 
under its enlightening influence, a system of individual self- 
government will be in operation, and a system of free civil go- 
vernment even in preparation, to receive man under the shelter 
of their twofold shield, in that moment of temptation and peril 
in which he first passes in triumph from the power of his op- 
pressor. 

Such, we know, was the influence of this system, at the criti- 
cal period of our own Revolution, when our fathers, under no 
other influences than those of the free and common schools 
which the Puritans had founded, and in which the principles of 
the people for a century and a half had been formed, were seen, 
as unflushed by triumph as they had been unterrified by defeat, 
building up the walls of a free constitutional government with 
one hand, even while they were still obliged to hold the weapons 
of war against a yet unsubdued and relentless foe in the other! 
And though it can be hardly hoped that a spectacle of equal 
sublimity, that an example of equal self-government, will soon 
again be exhibited to the world, some near approach and close 
analogy to it may be confidently anticipated in the future politi- 
cal changes of educated, school-taught Europe. 

But it is in its relation to the future condition of our own 
country, that it is most interesting to contemplate the political 
influences of popular education. Here, where society needs 
not to be reduced to political chaos again in order that its crea- 
tion may begin aright ; where all the modes of inequality and 
oppression, which seem to sanction a resort to force and vio- 
lence when they can be put an end to in no other way, have been 
banished in advance ; where no thrones remain to be over- 
turned, and no revolutions achieved, in order to establish the 
forms of a free government in their purest and most perfect 
shape, — here, the legitimate influence of a Free School system 
in giving substance and security to these forms, by counteract- 
ing and controlHng those impulses and propensities by which 
they are so liable to be abused and perverted, and in gradually 



IGO FREE SCHOOLS AND FREE GOVERNMENTS. 

rendering the government itself freer and freer by transferring 
more and more of the restraints which the safety of the body 
politic requires, from powers that are without us to those ivhich 
are tvithin tts, can be more uniformly exerted and more plainly 
perceived. Here, where there is no ground for apprehension 
that any course of education will be designedly adopted but 
such as most of all others may conduce to the maintenance and 
advancement of the public liberty, the identity of the great inter- 
ests of Free Schools and Free Governments will be more fully 
and conspicuously manifested. 

" In the United States," says De Tocqueville, in his masterly 
account of American democracy, '■'' politics are the end and aim 
of education ; in Europe, its principal object is to fit men for 
private life." The first branch of the antithesis is just and true, 
or ought to be so, if it is not ; but not as colored and qualified 
by the last. Politics are or ought to be the ultimate end and 
aim of all popular education in the United States; not party 
politics, not controversial, electioneering, office-seeking politics ; 
not politics as distinguished from private life, as M. De Tocque- 
ville would seem to distinguish them, but politics as including 
in one and the same comprehensive signification, as in the voca- 
bulary of a free country they do, all the relations and obliga- 
tions of the citizen to the State. There is no such thing in a 
free country as private life, in the sense in which it seems here 
to have been used, and in the sense in which it is always under- 
stood in Europe. No man liveth to himself, even humanly 
speaking, in a Republic. Every man has public duties. Every 
man is a public man. Every man holds offices ; those of a 
juryman, a militia man, an elector. Or rather every man holds 
one, high, sacred, all-embracing office, whose tenure is nothing 
less than life, and whose duties are nothing less than the whole 
duties of life, — the ofHce of a free citizen. The triple respon- 
sibilities which I have enumerated, those of the polls, the train- 
ing-field, and the jury-box, by no means exhaust the obliga- 
tions of every free citizen to his country. I have already ex- 
emplified, in another part of my remarks, the power of each 
individual member of a free community, by yielding to ungo- 
verned passions and indulging in abandoned courses, to de- 



FREE SCHOOLS AND FREE GOVERNMENTS. 161 

range the political system, to diminish the general liberty, and 
to affect and alter the very nature of the government. And it 
cannot be too strongly enforced, in this connection, that the 
whole life and conversation, the whole conduct and character, of 
every free citizen is reflected and, as it were, represented in the 
administration of public affairs, — every thought, even, of every 
one of them going to make up that mighty current of Public 
Opinion, which is nothing less than Law in its first reading. 

It is a peculiar and beautiful property of free government, 
that it invests the humblest and most private virtues with a 
public importance and dignity; making society, as Mr. Burke 
has well expressed it, not only " a partnership in all science 
and in all art," but " in all virtue and in all perfection," 
and superinducing upon all ordinary motives to the prac- 
tice of virtue something of high official obligation and lofty 
patriotic sanction. This very quality of patriotism — what a 
new extension and comprehensive character has liberty imparted 
to it I No longer are its laurels appropriated to one or two 
limited lines of public service, but they are planted along the 
borders of every walk in life, and lowered to the reach of the 
humblest hand. Not alone under a free government is he a 
patriot, who marshals armies in the field to a successful onset 
upon some foreign assailant of the nation's liberties ; not alone 
he, who arrays arguments in the Senate chamber to a triumph- 
ant issue against some domestic destroyer of its prosperity and 
welfare. He, too, the most retired and humble citizen, who 
never lifted his arm in battle or his voice in council, but who, 
neglecting none of the few direct political duties which the 
forms of a free government impose, has devoted himself to the 
discharge of the thousand indirect ones which the spirit of such 
a government implies, and its security and advancement im- 
peratively demands, — who has combated his own passions, who 
has taken council of his own enlightened conscience, who has 
studied the art and practised the exercise of an intelligent self- 
government, — he has acted a part, achieved a victory, afforded 
an example, which have no less patriotism, and even more pro- 
mise of perpetuity and progress to free governipent in them, 
than the most brilliant triumphs of the field or the forum. 
H* 



162 FREE SCHOOLS AND FREE GOVERNMENTS. 

Yes; politics in this large and comprehensive signification, 
which the very nature of free institutions has given them, includ- 
ing all the duties of self-government as well as of civil govern- 
ment, ought to be the end and aim of all education in the United 
States ; and the influences of all education, whatever may be its 
end and aim, will be and must be jwliticaL The present fortunes 
of the Republic may, indeed, be already beyond the reach of 
parental discipline and schoolhouse influence. But our regards 
end not with the hour, — certainly not our responsibilities. And 
it is a false and fatal notion that the future is beyond our con- 
trol. It would be nearer the truth to say, that the present is so. 
How much of all that we are, or do, or enjoy, or suffer, how great 
a portion of all in us and all about us that goes to mark and 
determine the existing condition and immediate character of 
our country, is the result, not of any action of our own, or effort 
of the moment, but of what our fathers and mothers and teach- 
ers have done or left undone in our behalf! And the present is 
not more the child of the past, than it is the parent of the future. 
The infant, " mewling and puking in the nurse's arms," or the 
whining shoolboy, "with his satchel and shining morning face, 
creeping like snail unwillingly to school," can, indeed, give 
neither vote nor verdict to-day. They have neither part nor lot 
in the Republic of the present instant. But when, unless at this 
very moment, are they to learn the lessons, imbibe the principles, 
acquire the habits, by which its future fate is to be not so much 
influenced as decided; not so much colored or characterized 
as constituted and made up ? In them the future is personified, 
and posterity put bodily into our hands. And over them our 
control is neither conjectural nor limited. As the doves of his 
mother Venus guided the old iEneas to the golden branch, so 
may the hovering tenderness and winged watchfulness of a 
faithful mother still conduct her child to a wisdom better than 
sold. And the rod of the Teacher of Israel was not more potent 
to summon from beyond the sea whatever might plague and 
harass the oppressor and promote the deliverance and freedom 
of his people, than is that of the teacher at the present day to 
caU up from over the ocean of the future a posterity which shall 
preserve, vindicate, and advance the liberties transmitted to them. 



FREE SCHOOLS AND FREE GOVERNMENTS. 163 

Whatever uncertainty there may be as to the correspondence of 
means and ends in other matters of human arrangement, of this 
we are assured, — " Train up a child in the way he should go, 
and when he is old he will not depart from it." 

Not, then, for any mere ends of " private life," not for any 
purpose of individual display or personal accomplishment, not 
for the mere object of gratifying parental pride or family ambi- 
tion, but as a matter of public, political, patriotic duty, should 
education be pursued in the United States. Children should be 
educated as those by whom the destinies of the nation are one 
day to be wielded, and free schools cherished as places in which 
those destinies are even now to be woven. It has been recorded 
as a saying of Mahomet that " the ink of the scholar and the 
blood of the martyr are equal." It would be difficult to bring 
an American of this generation, especially if he happened to be 
standing, as we now are, at the foot of Bunker Hill, to acknow- 
ledge that there could be any thing equal — equal in its claim 
upon his regard and reverence, or equal in its influence upon our 
national welfare and freedom — to the blood of our Revolution- 
ary martyrs. But in this we must all agree, that nothing but 
the ink of the scholar can preserve, what the blood of the martyr 
has purchased. The experiment of free government is not one 
which can be tried once for all. Every generation must try it 
for itself. Our fathers tried it, and were gloriously successful. 
We are now engaged in the trial, and, thank God, we have not 
yet failed. But neither our success, nor that of our fathers, can 
afford any thing but example and encouragement to those who 
are to try*it next. As each new generation starts up to the re- 
sponsibilities of manhood, there is, as it were, a new launch of 
Liberty, and its voyage of experiment begins afresh. But the 
oracles have declared that its safety and success depend not so 
much upon the conduct of those engaged in it during the pas- 
sage, as upon their preparations before they embark. The winds 
and waves must be propitiated before the shore is left, or wi'eck 
and ruin will await them. But this propitiation consists, not 
in some cruel proceeding like that prescribed by the heathen 
oracle to the Grecian fleet, in binding son or daughter upon the 
pile of sacrifice, aud offering up their tortured bodies and ago- 



164 FREE SCHOOLS AND FREE GOVERNMENTS. 

nized souls to appease an angry deity, but in a process which is 
not more certain to call down the best blessing of Heaven upon 
the enterprise, and to secure a peaceful and prosperous voyage, 
than it is to promote the truest happiness and welfare of those 
upon wiiom it is performed. Sons and daughters devoted to 
Education are the only sacrifice which God has prescribed to 
render the progress of Free Government safe and certain. 



THE BIBLE. 



Aisr ADDRESS DELIVERED AT THE ANNUAL MEETING OF THE MASSACHU- 
SETTS BIBLE SOCIETY IN BOSTON, MAY 28, 1849. 



In rising to move the adoption of the Report which has just 
been read, I feel deeply, Mr. President, how apt I shall be to 
disappoint any part of the expectations of this meeting, which 
may, by any chance, have been directed towards myself. I have 
not come here this afternoon in the hope of saying any thing 
which might not be better said by others more accustomed to 
deal with occasions of this sort ; or any thing, indeed, which has 
not been, a hundred times already, better said by those who have 
heretofore taken part in these Anniversary celebrations. 

But I was unwilling to refuse any service which your com- 
mittee of arrangements might even imagine me capable of ren- 
dering to the cause in which you are assembled. I could not 
find it in my conscience, or in my heart, to decline bearing my 
humble testimony, whenever and wherever it might be called for, 
to the transcendent interest and importance of the object for 
which this Association has now lived and labored for the con- 
siderable period of forty years. 

That object is the publication and general distribution of the 
Holy Scriptures ; and no man, I am sure, who has had the privi- 
lege of listening to the Report of my Reverend friend, (Dr. Park- 
man,) and who has a soul capable of appreciating the grandeur of 
those aggregate results which he has so well set forth, can fail to 
pronounce it one of the greatest, most important, most compre- 
hensive and catholic objects, to which human means and human 
efforts have ever been devoted. 

The week on which we have just entered, has been signalized, 



166 THE BIBLE. 

I had almost said hallowed, among us, for many years past, by 
the meetings of many noble associations ; and a record of phi- 
lanthropy and charity has been annually presented to us in their 
reports and addresses, which must have filled every benevolent 
bosom with joy. But it has been a most appropriate and signi- 
ficant arrangement, that this Society should take the lead in these 
Anniversary festivals. Undoubtedly, Sir, the first of all chari- 
ties, the noblest of all philanthropies, is that which brings the 
Bible home to every fireside, which places its Divine truths within 
the range of every eye, and its blessed promises and consolations 
within the reach of every heart. 

All other charities should follow, and, indeed, they naturally 
do follow, in the train of this. Let the great work of this Asso- 
ciation be thoroughly prosecuted and successfully accomplished, 
and the soil will be prepared, and the seed sown, for a golden 
and glorious harvest. 

Diffuse the knowledge of the Bible, and the hungry will be fed, 
and the naked clothed. Diffuse the knowledge of the Bible, and 
the stranger will be sheltered, the prisoner visited, and the sick 
ministered unto. Diffuse the knowledge of the Bible, and Tem- 
perance will rest upon a surer basis than any mere private pledge 
or public statute. Diffuse the knowledge of the Bible, and the 
peace of the world will be secured by more substantial safe- 
guards than either the mutual fear, or the reciprocal interests, of 
princes or of people. Diffuse the knowledge of the Bible, and 
the day will be hastened, as it can be hastened in no other way, 
when every yoke shall be loosened, and every bond broken, and 
when there shall be no more leading into captivity. 

It is the influence of the Bible, in a word, by w^hich the very 
fountains of philanthropy must be unsealed, and all the great 
currents of human charity set in motion. It is here alone that we 
can find the principles, the precepts, the examples, the motives, 
the rewards, by which men can be effectually moved to supply 
the wants and relieve the sufferings of their fellow-men, and to 
recognize the whole human race as members of a common 
family, and children of a common Parent. 

Is it not the Bible, Sir, which teaches us that "to visit the 
fatherless and widows in their aflliction," is as vital a part of pure 



THE BIBLE. 1G7 

and undefiled religion, as "to keep ourselves unspotted from the 
world?" Is it not the Bible which instructs us, that while " to 
love God with all our heart is the first and great commandment," 
"to love our neighbor as ourself is the second and like unto it?" 
Is it not the Bible which charges " those who are rich in this 
world, that they be ready to give and glad to distribute, laying 
up for themselves a good foundation against the time to come, 
that they may attain eternal life ? " 

Is it not plain, then, Mr. President, that the original moving 
spring, and the still sustaining power, of that whole system 
of moral and religious machinery, whose grand results are so 
proudly exhibited to us during this Anniversary week, must be 
found in the promulgation and diffusion of the Holy Scriptures ? 
May we not fairly say, without arrogance on our own part or 
disparagement towards others, that all other benevolent associa- 
tions are but distributors and service-pipes (if I may so speak) 
to that great Reservoir of living waters, over which this Associa- 
tion has assumed the special guardianship, and which it is its 
chosen and precious province to keep fresh, and full, and free to 
all the world ? 

Even this, however, I am aware. Sir, is but a single and a 
somewhat subordinate aspect of the great work in which you 
are engaged. Indeed, as we hold up this subject in the sunlight 
before our eyes, we find a thousand other vievv^s of its interest 
and importance multiplying and brightening around us, as in a 
prism. 

Regarded only as a mere human and utterly uninspired com- 
position, (if, indeed, it be possible for any one so to regard it,) 
who can over-estimate, who can adequately appreciate, the value 
of the Bible as a book for general circulation, reading, and study ? 
I remember to have seen it somewhere mentioned, that in an 
old English Statute of about the year 1516, — I doubt not that 
you, Mr. President,* could tell us the precise date of its pas- 
sage, — the sacred volume, instead of being denominated Bi- 
blion, the book, was called Bibliotheca, — the library. And what 
a library it must have been in that early day of English litera- 

* Hon. Simon Greenleaf occulted the Chair. 



168 THE BIBLE. 

ture! Nay, what a library it still is to us all now! Within 
what other covers have ever been comprised such diversified 
stores of entertainment and instruction, such inexhaustible mines 
of knowledge and wisdom I 

The oldest of all books, as in part it certainly is ; the most 
common of all books, as the efforts of these associations have 
now undoubtedly made it; — how truly may we say of it, that 
" age cannot wither, nor custom stale its infinite variety I" The 
world, which seems to outgrow successively all other books, finds 
still in this an ever fresh adaptation to every change in its con- 
dition and every period in its history. Now, as a thousand years 
ago, it has lessons alike for individuals and for nations; for rulers 
and for people ; for monarchies and for republics ; for times of 
stability and for times of overthrow ; for the rich and the poor ; 
for the simplest and the wisest. 

Whatever is most exquisite in style, whatever is most charm- 
ing in narrative, whatever is most faithful in description, what- 
ever is most touching in pathos, whatever is most sublime in 
imagery, whatever is most marvellous in incident, whatever is 
most momentous in import, find here alike and always their 
unapproached and unapproachable original. 

It was but a day or two since that I was reading that the 
great German poet, Goethe, had said of the little book of Ruth, 
that there was nothing so lovely in the whole range of epic or 
idyllic poetry. It was but yesterday that I was reading the 
tribute of the no less distinguished Humboldt to the matchless 
fidelity and grandeur of the Hebrew lyrics, in the course of 
which he speaks of a single Psalm (the 104tb) as presenting a 
picture of the entire Cosmos. I have heard that our own Fisher 
Ames, who has left behind him a reputation for eloquence hardly 
inferior to that of any American Orator either of his own day 
or of ours, was accustomed to say that he owed more of the 
facility and felicity of his diction to I he Bible, and particularly 
to the book of Deuteronomy, than to any other source, ancient 
or modern. 

Indeed, Sir, the art, the literature, and the eloquence of all 
countries and of all times, have united in paying a common 
homage to the Bible. It has inspired the noblest strains of 



THE BIBLE. 169 

music and the loftiest triumphs of the painter. Where would 
be the harmonics of the great composers, where would be the 
galleries of the old masters, without the subjects with which the 
Bible has supplied them ? 

Other books, I know, both in ancient and modern times, have 
received striking tributes to their genius, their ability, their no- 
velty, their fascination. It will never be forgotten by the admirers 
of Homer, that Alexander the Great carried the Iliad always 
about w^ith him in a golden casket. It will never be forgotten 
by the eulogists of Grotius, that Gustavus Adolphus, in the 
war which he waged in Germany for the liberty of Protestant 
Europe, slept always wdth the treatise De Jure Belli ac Pads on 
his pillow. But how many caskets and how many pillows have 
borne testimony to the Bible ! Yes, Sir, of heroes and con- 
querors, not less mighty than the Macedonian or the Swede; 
and not of those only who have been called to wrestle against 
flesh and blood, but of those who have contended " against 
principalities and powers, against the rulers of the darkness of 
this W'Orld, against spiritual wickedness in high places," and 
who have found in this holy volume, as in the very armory of 
Heaven, "the sword of the Spirit, the breastplate of righteous- 
ness, the helmet of salvation, and the shield of faith, by which 
they have been able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked." 

I perceive, Mr. President, how impossible it is to separate the 
influence of the Bible as a mere book, from that which it owes 
to its divine character and origin. And they ought not to be 
separated. Unquestionably, it is as containing the word of God, 
the revelation of immortality, the gospel of salvation, that the 
Bible presents its preeminent title to the affection and reverence 
of the world. And it is in this view above all others, that its 
universal distribution becomes identified with the highest tempo- 
ral and eternal interests of the human race. 

I say, wdth the highest temporal, as well as eternal interests of 
the human race; and I desire to dwell for a single moment 
longer, on the inseparable connection of the work in w^hich this 
and other kindred associations are engaged, with the advance- 
ment of civilization, with the elevation of mankind, and with 
the establishment and maintenance of Free Institutions. I 

15 



ITO THE BIBLE. 

desire, especially, to express the opinion, which I have been 
led of late to cherish daily and deeply, — that every thing in the 
character of our own institutions, and every thing in the imme- 
diate condition of our own country, calls for the most diligent 
employment of all the moral and religious agencies within our 
reach, and particularly for increased activity in the distribution 
of the Bible. 

Mr. President, there is a striking coincidence of dates in the 
history of our country, and in the history of the Bible. You 
remember that it was about the year 1607, that King James the 
First, of blessed memory for this if for nothing else, gave it in 
charge to fifty or sixty of the most learned ministers of his realm, 
to prepare that version of the Holy Scriptures, which is now 
everywhere received and recognized among Protestant Christians 
as the Bible. This version was finally published in 1611, and it 
is from this event that the general diftusion of the Bible may 
fairly be said to date. 

The Bible had, indeed, been more than once previously trans- 
lated and previously printed. During the two preceding centu- 
ries, there had been Wickliff's version, and Tyndale's version, 
and Coverdale's version, and Cranmer's version, and the Geneva 
Bible, and the Douay Bible, and I know not what others ; and 
they had all been more or less extensively circulated and read, 
in manuscript or in print, in churches and in families, sometimes 
under the sanction, and sometimes in defiance of the civil and 
spiritual authorities. 

I doubt not that many of my hearers will remember the vivid 
picture which Dr. Franklin has given us, in his autobiography, 
of the manner in which the Bible was read during a portion of 
this period. Some of his progenitors, it seems, in the days of 
bloody Mary, were the fortunate possessors of an English Bible, 
and to conceal it the more securely, they were driven, he tells us 
"to the project of fastening it open with pack threads across the 
leaves, on the inside of the lid of the close-stool." 

" When my great-grandfather (he proceeds) wished to read 
the Bible to his family, he reversed the lid of the stool upon his 
knees, and passed the leaves from one side to the other, which 
were held down on each by the pack thread. One of the child- 



THE BIBLE. 171 

ren was stationed at the door to give notice if he saw the proctor 
(an officer of the spiritual court) make his appearance ; in that 
case, the lid was restored to its place, with the Bible concealed 
under it as before." 

It is plain, that however precious the Bible must have been to 
those who possessed it in those days, and however strong the 
influence which it may have exerted over individual minds, it 
had little chance to manifest its power over the masses, under 
circumstances like these. Indeed, the whole number of printed 
Bibles in existence in Great Britain, up to the commencement 
of the seventeenth century, is estimated at only about one hun- 
dred and seventeen thousand; — a little more than one fifth the 
number distributed by the American Bible Society, and only a 
little more than one tenth the number distributed by the British 
and Foreign Bible Society, during the single year last past. 

It is, thus, only from the publication of the authorized and 
standard version of King James, that the general diffusion of the 
Holy Scriptures can be said to have commenced. It was then 
that the printed word of God "first began to have free course 
and to be glorified," And that, you remember, Mr. President, 
was the very date of the earliest settlement of these North Ame- 
rican Colonies. It was just then, that the Cavaliers were found 
planting themselves at Jamestown in Virginia; and it was just 
then, that the Pilgrims, with the Bible in their hands, were seen 
flying over to Leyden, on their way to our own Plymouth Rock. 

And now, Sir, it is not more true, in my judgment, that the 
first settlement of our country was precisely coincident in point 
of time, with the preparation and publication of this standard 
version of the Bible, than it is that our free institutions have 
owed their successful rise and progress thus far, and are destined 
to owe their continued security and improvement in time to 
come, to the influences which that preparation and publication 
could alone have produced. 

The voice of experience and the voice of our own reason speak 
but one language on this point. Both unite in teaching us, that 
men may as well build their houses upon the sand and expect 
to see them stand, when the rains fall, and the winds blow, and 
the floods come, as to found free institutions upon any other 



172 THE BIBLE. 

basis than that morality and virtue, of which the Word of God 
is the only authoritative rule, and the only adequate sanction. 

All societies of men must be governed in some way or other. 
The less they may have of stringent State Government, the more 
they must have of individual self-government. The less they 
rely on public law or physical force, the more they must rely 
on private moral restraint. Men, in a word, must necessarily be 
controlled, either by a power within them, or by a power without 
them ; either by the word of God, or by the strong arm of man ; 
either by the Bible, or by the bayonet. It may do for other coun- 
tries and other governments to talk about the State supporting 
religion. Here, under our own free institutions, it is Religion 
which must support the State. 

And never more loudly than at this moment have these insti- 
tutions of ours called for such support. The immense increase 
of our territorial ^possessions, with the wild and reckless spirit 
of adventure which they have brought with them ; the recent 
discovery of the gold mines of California, with the mania for 
sudden acquisition, for " making haste to be rich," which it has 
everywhere excited ; the vast annual accession to our shores of 
nearly half a million of foreigners, so many of whom are with- 
out any other notion of liberty, at the outset, than as the absence 
of all restraint upon their appetites and passions; — who does 
not perceive in all these circumstances that our country is threat- 
ened, more seriously than it ever has been before, with that moral 
deterioration, which has been the unfailing precursor of political 
downfall ? And who is so bold a believer in any system of hu- 
man checks and balances as to imagine, that dangers like these 
can be effectively counteracted or averted in any other way, than 
by bringing the mighty moral and religious influences of the 
Bible to bear in our defence. 

As patriots, then, no less than as Christians, Mr. President, I 
feel that we are called upon to unite in the good work of this 
Association. And let us rejoice that it is a work in which we 
can all join hands without hesitation or misgiving. There is no 
room here, I thank heaven, for differences of parties or of sects. 
There is no room here for controversies about systems or details. 
Your machinery is of all others the most simple. Your results 






THE BIBLE. I73 



are of all others the most certain. In a period of little more 
than forty years, by the agency of associations like this, more 
than thirty-five millions of Bibles and Testaments have been 
distributed throughout the world, and more than six millions of 
them within the limits of our own land. Let us persevere in 
this noble enterprise. And let each one of us resolve to secure 
for himself, against the hour which sooner or later must come 
to us all, that consolation which I doubt not is at this moment 
cheering the decline of your late venerable President, (Dr. 
Pierce,) — the consolation of reflecting, that it has not been for 
the want of any proportionate contributions or proportionate 
efforts on our part, if every human being has not had a Bible 
to live by, and a Bible to die by. 
I move the adoption of the Report. 



la 



COMPENSATION 



FOR THE 



DESTRUCTION OF THE URSULINE COiNVENT. 

A SPEECH DELIVERED IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES OF MASSA- 
CHUSETTS, MARCH Vi, lb35. 



I WOULD willingly be excused, Mr. Speaker, from any partici- 
pation in this debate. I am entirely aware that little personal 
satisfaction, and certainly no personal popularity, is to be gained 
by an expression of the sentiments which I entertain upon the 
question at issue. But having, by a position not of my own 
seeking, been led into some investigation of the occurrence 
under consideration, immediately after it took place, I feel that 
it would be a desertion of duty for me to remain entirely silent. 

I beg the House to believe that I have not seized upon the 
topic as an excuse for making a speech. Materials, indeed, 
there are in the circumstances of the case, which well might 
serve such a turn. Old and hackneyed as they may seem ; — 
threadbare as they may be supposed to have become, by their 
continual wear and tear, for the last six or seven months, in the 
public papers, in private conversation, in the reports of Com- 
mittees, and in the arguments of the Bar, — I yet venture to say 
that there are not only unexhausted, but almost unnoticed, 
incidents in the history of this transaction, which, in the hands 
of one skilled and practised in touching the strings and sound- 
ing the stops of the human breast, might be made to harrow up 
the sternest soul, and freeze the youngest blood among us. 

But I have no such skill, and have risen for no such purpose. 
I would, on the contrary, separate this question, as far as possi- 



DESTRUCTION OP THE URSULINB CONVENT. 175 

ble, from every circumstance appealing to the mere feelings of 
men. I would throw out from both sides of it all that is calcu- 
lated to excite either sympathy or prejudice, and would hold an 
even hand between a blind commiseration on the one side, and 
an averted hostility on the other. 

And now. Sir, what is the exact question before us ? It ap- 
pears that on the night of the eleventh of August last, an insti- 
tution, established partly for purposes of religion, partly for pur- 
poses of education, and partly for purposes of charity, — an 
institution established under the laws of the land, and paying 
the price of protection to the government in the prescribed form 
of annual taxes, — was besieged by a mob, sacked, pillaged, 
and burned ; and this — not silently, not secretly, not in a mo- 
ment, in the twinkling of an eye — but by a course of con- 
certed measures, openly and publicly carried on for a period of 
six or seven hours in succession, in the presence of thousands 
of spectators, while not a single arm was lifted in its defence. 

Upon these facts, universally admitted, the proprietors of the 
institution have presented a claim for indemnification, and upon 
this claim the two counter Reports, now under consideration, 
have been submitted to this House. 

There are some things in both of these Reports with which I 
cordially agree ; there are other things in both of them from 
which I entirely disagree. Not that I intend, by this remark, to 
couple the two documents as having, in my humble judgment, 
equal claims upon our favorable consideration. By no means. 
The whole spirit of that presented by the majority of the com 
mittee, I am happy to agree with ; in one single principle only 
do I differ from them. The whole spirit, on the other hand, of 
that submitted by the minority of the committee, I am as happy 
to dissent from ; in one accidental, and perhaps unintentional, 
admission, only, can I at all agree with them. I do not pro- 
pose. Sir, to enter into any very detailed analysis of either of 
these papers. But before I proceed further, I beg leave to call 
the attention of the House to two or three paragraphs in the 
report of the minority. And especially would I call to them 
the attention of the signers of that report themselves ; for I am 
willing to believe that they are as yet unaware of its full import. 



176 COMPENSATION FOR THE 

On the nineteenth page of the printed document containing 
these reports, is this extraordinary sentence, — " The moment 
this Commonwealth consents to tax herself for the repair of 
damages, which have, or have not, resulted from her own injus- 
tice or criminal neglect, she countenances a belief that she is 
willing to admit her own responsibility as an accessory to the 
wrong. Dignity, then, is not preserved nor regained in this 
way." Countenance a belief! Why, Sir, if damages have re- 
sulted from the injustice or criminal neglect of the Common- 
wealth, she is already an accessory to the wrong ; and no ad- 
mission of her responsibility is required to countenance, nor 
will any denial of her responsibility suffice to discountenance, 
such a belief. And as to her dignity, — I leave the gentlemen 
to judge whether it is least compromised in such a case by 
denying and refusing to repair the wrong, or by confessing and 
making amends. One thing, Mr. Speaker, I will grant to the 
gentlemen, and that is, that the whole strength of this para- 
graph, inconsistent and absurd as it is, is needed to sustain the 
conclusions at which they have arrived. 

Again, on the twenty-third page of the document, it is thus 
written, — " Let the fathers and guardians of our State help the 
friends and professors of their own religion." Pray, Sir, what 
is their oicn religion ? What distinction less broad than that 
which includes the whole Christian church, throughout all the 
world, — Roman Catholic and Protestant Catholic alike, — com- 
prehends the religion of the fathers and guardians of our State? 
The people of Massachusetts are indeed, for the most part, 
Protestants, and ever may they continue so ! But the State, 
thank heaven, is yet allied to no Church, and never may it be- 
come so ! Religious freedom, and not merely religious tolera- 
tion, is her motto, and the minority of the committee will strive 
in vain to blot it out. 

But the argument of the minority report is mainly based 
upon a form of oath, which previously to 1820 was a part of 
the Constitution of Massachusetts, and which was ordered to 
be taken and subscribed by all the officers of the Common- 
wealth. Now, the Convention of 1820 abolished this oath ; but 
the minority report, having been written originally in professed 






DESTRUCTION OF THE URSULINB CONVENT. 177 

and admitted ignorance of its abolition, asserts, in its amended 
form, that it was only " laid aside for one more concise." Sir, 
my friend from Worcester (Mr. Kinnicutt) has sufTiciently an- 
swered this singular position. He has told us truly that the 
Convention of 1820, composed as it was of the most distin- 
guished men of Massachusetts, did not assemble for the pur- 
pose of criticizing and amending the phraseology of the Con- 
stitution, and spent none of their time in that frivolous employ- 
ment. But even if it were not so, even if the oath itself still 
disfigured our charter, I undertake to say that the doctrines of 
the minority report could not be legitimately drawn from it. 
Some years ago, there was published, under the direction of this 
Legislature, a little volume containing the records of the Con- 
vention which originally framed our Constitution. In this 
meagre skeleton of a book, there is one fact clearly and dis- 
tinctly set forth. In every instance in which the word Christian 
is used, or in which any allusion to religion or to the privileges 
of its professors occurs in the Constitution, it appears that an 
effort was made to introduce an exception, excluding Roman 
Catholics from the common family of Christians. And in 
every instance it failed. And what does that prove. Sir ? Why, 
that our fathers in 1780 were unwilling to assume the ground, 
which the minority of this committee in the year 1835 have 
taken, that Roman Catholics were, ijjso facto, aliens from our 
Commonwealth, honoring " the Pope as their liege lord," and 
having " their country in Italy." Even at that day, if any Ro- 
man Catholic chose to renounce his allegiance to all foreign 
sovereigns, potentates, and prelates, or to declare upon oath that 
no such allegiance existed, our fathers were willing to believe 
him ; and he was eligible to the chief magistracy, or any other 
office in the State. And even this renunciation, or declaration, 
was only required of Roman Catholics in common with all 
other candidates for office, whatever might be their creed. So 
much. Sir, for the basis and superstructure of the minority 
report ! 

And now, Mr. Speaker, let me declare distinctly the opinion 
which I have formed upon the question before us. I go for the 
claim of the Petitioners, and I think this Commonwealth is 



178 COMPENSATION FOR THE 

bound in equity to make good the losses which they have sus- 
tained. And in support of this opinion, I rely upon the first 
principles of society and of our own government, as applied to 
the circumstances of the case. What are those principles, and 
where shall we find them laid down ? They are inscribed on 
the very portals of our Constitution. The Bill of Rights con- 
tains a clear and explicit declaration of them. Besides asserting 
that government is instituted for the protection and safety of 
the people, who are consequently bound to contribute their share 
of personal service or pecuniary equivalent to the expense of this 
protection, — it has this plain and express provision : " each in- 
dividual of the society has a right to be protected by it, in the 
enjoyment of his life, liberty, and property, according to stand- 
ing laws." Now if every individual has a right to be protected, 
society is under an obligation to afford that protection; and this 
obligation of society is admitted on all sides of the House, and 
in both reports. But, we are told, society is bound to protect by 
standing laws, and in no other way. That may be very true. Sir, 
but it has nothing to do with the justice of this claim. The 
Petitioners have not come here to ask for protection. It is alto- 
gether too late for them to present such a claim. Their pro- 
perty has been destroyed, and their claim is for indemnification; 
and the question now is whether society, being under an admit- 
ted obligation to afford them protection, and having failed to 
discharge that obligation, is or is not justly responsible for the 
damages arising from that failure. 

Well, Sir, how is it with other obligations ? Suppose, for a 
moment, that any gentleman in this House is under an ohUgation 
to convey to me a certain piece of estate, and he fails from any 
cause to discharge that obligation ; — will he presume to tell me 
that, though he was bound to convey that estate, he was bound 
to do nothing else, and that having failed in that, my claim upon 
him is at an end. Why, the idea is too absurd to require an 
answer. It needs no lawyer to tell him that any court of com- 
petent jurisdiction would make him respond to me in damages. 
And how do the obligations of society or of the State differ from 
those of an individual? The State has entered into a direct 
contract with every one of its citizens, and every one of the 



DESTRUCTION OP THE URSULINE CONVENT. 179 

citizens with the State ; — protection is the consideration on one 
side, and allegiance on the other. If the citizen fails to dis- 
charge his part of the contract, the State proceeds at once to 
compel or to punish him ; and if the State fails to discharge 
her part, she is bound, in good faith, to make reparation. There 
is indeed no court of law into which the citizen can summon 
her. This " Great and General Court" is his first place of hear- 
ing, and his final place of appeal. And that appeal is at best but 
an appeal from Cassar to Caesar. But this does not at all affect 
the justice of the claim, however it may affect the fairness of 
the hearing. 

There is no doubt, Mr. Speaker, that this doctrine needs some 
qualification and some limitation. But none other are required 
as I think, than such as common law and common sense will 
readily suggest. It is equally a maxim of both. Lex cogit ne- 
minem ad impossibilia ; — no one is bound to do that which is 
impossible. Society cannot always stop the hand of the secret 
assassin, the midnight incendiary, the expert thief, or the cun- 
ning counterfeiter. Protection of this sort is often in its own 
nature impossible, and all that society can do, in cases of 
this kind, is to hunt out and punish the guilty. But wherever 
protection is practicable, she is absolutely bound to provide it. 

And it is in relation to this particular principle tha/t I dissent 
from the opinion expressed by the majority of the committee. 
They tell us that " it is true that by the theory of our institu- 
tions, the government is bound to afford protection to the citizen 
in consideration of his allegiance," — but then they go on to 
say, " your committee suppose that this protection is afforded 
to every practicable extent, by the enactment, from time to time, 
as they shall be deemed necessary, of wholesome and proper 
laws, with remedies for their infraction." Now it seems to me 
Sir, that this assertion, and I say it with all due deference to the 
Committee, is a begging of the whole question at issue, — which 
is, as I conceive, whether the government has afforded to these 
petitioners every lyracticahh prolection. The argument of the 
Report seems to be this, — that the existing laws at any par- 
ticular period, whether good, bad, or indifferent, are to be con- 
sidered as affording to the citizens every practicable protection. 



180 COMPENSATION FOR THE 

In this opinion I cannot concur. Suppose, for a moment, there 
had been no law at all about riots, and no power vested in any- 
body to quell them. Would that be affording all practicable pro- 
tection to the citizen ? And what difference is there, either in 
principle or in practice, whether there be no law at all, or whe- 
ther the law be defective and impotent? I resign my right of » 
self-defence, — I put my wrists in fetters, and allow my arms to 
be tied behind me, — on condition that society will protect me; 
and I pay my taxes annually for the same consideration. It 
matters not to me whether it be from the want of any law, or 
from the defect of an existing law, or from an inefficient execu- 
tion of the law, — if the State could have protected me from in- 
jury, and did not, she is bound to make reparation. 

And this doctrine is implied, unintentionally perhaps, but still 
plainly implied, in the report of the minority. And in this 
implication, and in this only can I find any thing in their argu- 
ment to agree with. They tell you " that they know the State 
should guard against such evils, — yet not by making itself 
liable, if they happen in spite of the wisest precautions that 
can be employed to prevent them." And they add, " the duty 
of the Legislature is to enact the best, the most energetic laws 
to restrain and punish the lawless." Sir, I entirely agree in this 
position. But will these gentlemen or any other person pretend, 
that this destruction of property took place in spite of the ivisest 
precautions, and in defiance of the best and most energetic laws? 
Will any one of common sense be willing to admit, that hun- 
dreds of men may meet together, light up their signal fires, sound 
their alarm-bells, and proceed deliberately to rob, plunder, break, 
and burn, in presence of thousands of spectators, public oflficers 
and others, for six or eight hours in succession, in spite of the 
wisest precautions and in the face of the best and most energetic 
laws? Why, Sir, the wisdom of this world must indeed be 
foolishness, and its power impotency, and its strength must be 
to sit still, if this be the case. It is perfectly clear that there 
must either have been some great deficiency in the laws them- 
selves, or some palpable neglect in the execution of those laws. 
And for the latter the State is equally responsible as for the 
former, — both because the mode of execution is itself a matter 



DESTRUCTION OF THE URSULINE CONVENT. 181 

of legal provision, and because those to whom that execution 
is intrusted are her own agents, and of her own appointment. 

It is to this extent, Mr. Speaker, that I would carry the obli- 
gation of society to afford protection; — an extent marked and 
measured, as it seems to me, by the maxims of common sense 
and common justice. And if it be not so, all protection, all 
society, all government appears to me to be little better than a 
cheat and a mockery. For what is the right of the citizen to 
protection worth, if he has no remedy for the infraction of that 
right? What does the obligation of society to protect him 
amount to, if there is no responsibility for the discharge of that 
obligation ? Sir, it may be true, in one sense, that kings can do 
no wrong ; but it is not true in any sense, nor in any country, 
that governments can do no wrong. Power is one thing, and 
right is another. Every human being has rights. Human breath 
is God's passport to human rights. And the State is bound to 
protect those rights. She may fail to do so by omission, as 
well as by commission. If, in this very case, she had presumed 
to lay her hands upon the property of these petitioners, and ap- 
propriate it to her own use, every one knows they would have 
been entitled to compensation. And if she suffer others to lay 
their hands upon it and appropriate it to their own use, even 
though that use be only the feeding of their own rancorous and 
ravenous passions, the State is, and ought to be, equally an- 
swerable. 

But, we are tofd, she has provided a remedy. The courts of 
law, with all their pleas and processes, are at the service of the 
injured, and society is not responsible for the deficiency of evi- 
dence, or the escape of the guilty. This again is all very true, 
but it has no bearing upon the claim of the petitioners. They 
do not come here for indemnification, because their remedies 
elsewhere have failed. They impute no fault to the State on 
this score. The guilt of the State was at a much earlier stage 
of the transaction. It consisted in not affording protection, when 
it had power and opportunity to do so. And no remedy against 
others will atone for this guilt of its own. Society has two 
duties. They are described in two distinct and separate articles 
of the Bill of Rights. They are, in their own essence, distinct and 
16 



182 COMPENSATION FOR THE 

separate. And society is, and ought to be, distinctly and sepa- 
rately responsible for the discharge of both. The first duty is 
to aflbrd protection wherever it is practicable. The second is to 
provide a remedy against the aggressor wherever that is practi- 
cable. And it is the confounding of these distinct and separate 
duties of the government, and of the consequent rights of the 
citizens, which has led to what I hold to be the mistaken con- 
clusion of both reports, in relation to the claim of these peti- 
tioners. 

Gentlemen talk about a remedy in the courts of justice. Why, 
Sir, what is this remedy worth in a case like this ? What has it 
proved to be worth in this very case ? We all know ; — and we 
all knew as well before the trials as since. It will always be so. 
Wherever the public mind is so prejudiced and poisoned against 
any individual or any institution, that the hand of violence may 
be openly and successfully raised against them, and no one will 
come to their aid, it is matter almost of certainty, that the same 
prejudice will infect the channels of evidence, and obstruct the 
course of justice. 

I forbear, Mr. Speaker, to urge this argument further, though 
I am sensible that it is susceptible of being much further and 
much better enforced and illustrated. There is another view of 
this case which I proceed to present to the House. And I am 
aware that in doing so, I shall tread upon dangerous ground. 
Sir, this act was not the mere momentary violence of an ordinary 
mob. The committee have truly told us, that it is not to be 
supposed that the idle reports concerning Miss Harrison could 
have led to its perpetration. They were but sparks to the tinder, 
and only kindled and inflamed those combustible materials which 
had long been accumulating. The destruction of the Ursuline 
Convent had a deep-struck and wide-spread source in public 
opinion. Hundreds of men were actually concerned in the deed ; 
thousands were quiet spectators of its accomplishment ; and tens 
of thousands, I had almost said, had ministered to the delusion, 
fanaticism, and fury, which caused it to be attempted. We may 
almost say of it, what was said of one of the dark deeds of other 
times by a great Roman historian, — Is Imhitus animo7'um fitit, ut 
pessimum f acinus auderent jmuci, plures vellent, omnes palerentur. 



DESTRUCTION OF THE URSULINE CONVENT. 183 

Such was the state of the public mind, that though few dared 
to engage in the transaction, many more desired that it might be 
accomplished, and all, all permitted it to be done. 

I would not be thought to imply, that I believe that the people 
of Massachusetts, or any considerable portion of them, would 
have deliberately sanctioned such an act. No ; if it could have 
been previously put to vote, not one hand do I believe would 
have been held up in its favor, not even in Middlesex, or in Suf- 
folk, or wherever the infected district was, — unless, indeed, by the 
perpetrators themselves. Upon nobody but them do I charge de- 
liberate wrong, or malice aforethought. But we all know some- 
thing of the influences by which events are brought to pass. 
Some men speak daggers which they will not use, — nay, which 
they may not intend or expect that any body else shall use. A 
few warmer and less prudent spirits take them at their word, and 
deal home the blow. If, Sir, as I am disposed to think, it was 
as common a thing before the 11th of August, to say, that "the 
Convent ought to come down," as it has been since to say, that 
" we are glad it is down," reserving, perhaps, in this latter case, 
some faint and feeble salvo as to the manner of its destruction, 
it is only a wonder that it was permitted so long to cumber the 
ground on which it stood. 

It is this view of the matter. Sir, which, to my mind, makes it 
reasonable that the whole community should contribute to repair 
the losses which have been sustained. Asleep in my bed, though 
I was, when the act was committed, I can hardly help feel- 
ing a personal share in its guilt, and would gladly contribute my 
proportion of the indemnity. 

But we are told. Sir, that if we make an indemnification, or 
grant any gratuity, in this case, it will be recorded as a precedent, 
and wiil thus involve the State in endless responsibilities. Why, 
if it only be right, equitable, and just, to do this, the sooner it is 
recorded as a precedent, the better ; and the more such precedents 
there are upon our records, the more will it be for the honor of 
the State, and the welfare of the people. 

But do not gentlemen perceive the horror with which this 
idea is fraught ; and what a fearful looking-for in all time to 
come it implies ? Recorded as a precedent ! This indemni- 



184 COMPEXSATION FOR THE 

fication, or this gratuity, can never be fairly adduced as a prece- 
dent, except when the outrage itself has been followed as a 
precedent. And will gentlemen not only contemplate, but cal- 
culate, upon its recurrsjice? I can only say for one, Sir, that if 
I believed that this event were about to be a precedent in our 
history, and other acts of a similar character were about to be 
perpetrated within the borders of Massachusetts, I should be for 
plucking up at once such small stakes as I may have planted in 
her soil, for fleeing from the protection of her free and enlight- 
ened government, and for seeking shelter under any, the sternest 
tyranny, the darkest despotism on earth. Yes, upon the same 
principle that I would sooner pitch my tent at the foot of a 
volcano, whose friendly quake or monitory rumbling would 
warn me when its flames were about to burst above my head, 
than maintain a residence in one of your clear and balmy atmo- 
spheres, where ruin, ruin like this, might blaze down upon 
me at any moment, as lightning from a cloudless sky! 

But, Mr. Speaker, if we are wise, if we do our duty, no such 
event will again occur. The fires of that fatal night have dis- 
played to us our danger. They have made manifest the insuffi- 
ciency of our laws and the insecurity of our possessions. They 
have shone in upon and illumined a fearful chasm in our sys- 
tem, yawning at our very feet ; and if we do not neglect our 
duty, we shall fill it up, or bridge it over, before we quit these 
seats. Its first victims will thus be its last ; and if we should 
pay them to the uttermost farthing of their loss, we shall have 
cheaply purchased the experience. * 

But if the laws are to be left in their present impotent condi- 
tion, let the House look well to another consideration. Do gen- 
tlemen flatter themselves that the Roman Catholics are to be 
the only sufferers ? Are there to be no losses but what light on 
their shoulders; no sighs but of their breathing; no tears but of 
their shedding? Sir, if the spirit of violence is to have free 
vent; if religious, or moral, or political intolerance is forage 
unchecked ; if every now and then some portion of the people 

* The Lefrislature of Massachusetts, in 1839, passed t\. Law making towns and 
cities responsible to the amount of three quarters of the value of any property within 
their limits destroyed by rioters. 






DESTRUCTION OF THE URSULINE CONVENT. 185 

are to cry havoc, and let slip the brands of their vengeance upon 
the objects of their suspicion or their hate, who of us is safe ? 
What one man is there in this House, or in this whole State, 
who may not be glad that such a precedent has been esta- 
blished ? If, Sir, we are to be warned out of our beds at mid- 
night, and our wives and children sent shivering from beneath 
our blazing roofs, who is there that does not pray God that he 
may be able to point to a precedent somewhere, which shall 
ensure him a covering from the storm ? 

In stating my views of this question, Mr. Speaker, I have 
thus far made little allusion to the particular character of the 
institution in question. I have no partiality for the Roman 
Catholic creed. I have no fondness for convents, or monastic 
institutions of any kind. I wish sincerely that not an inch of 
ground on the whole continent of America was covered by them. 
But this is no part of this question. Justice is no respecter of 
persons. Equity is blind and bandaged to all distinctions of 
creed as well as of condition. 

But, as there are doubtless some members of the House who 
cannot rid themselves of the prejudice which the peculiar tenets 
of these petitioners are calculated to excite, I put to them one 
simple question. Do intolerance and persecution tend to eradi- 
cate heresy ? Is this the maxim which history has taught us ? 
No I Persecution, if it does not crush at once, creates new 
strength ; if it does not kill, it gives fresh life ; and I call upon 
every individual in this assembly, who deprecates the spread of 
Roman Catholicism in this country, to disarm its propagators of 
the powerful weapon which persecution has now placed in their 
hands. 

]Mr. Speaker, I cannot conclude without presenting one more 
consideration to all who hear me. This act it is too late to pre- 
vent. It is already upon the records of the irrevocable past. 
And wherever the name of Massachusetts shall be known or 
heard in all ages to come, wherever the story of the Pilgrims, 
the struggles of the Colonists, or the great battles of Inde- 
pendence shall be described, there, also, this dreadful deed, 
with all its circumstances of cowardice and cruelty, will bear 
them company. 

16* 



186 DESTRUCTION OF THE URSULINE CONVENT. 

It is of a character never to be lost sight of by those who per- 
petuate the memory of human events. The poet will embalm 
it in deathless song. The novelist will embody it in immortal 
story. Will, do I say ? He has already done so. Who is 
there, henceforth, who can read again the Abbot of Walter 
Scott, without thinking that the same spirit of superstition and 
bigotry, which revelled and rioted in that scene of moral and 
religious darkness, has risen again from its sleep of ages, and 
having found no foothold among its ancient haunts, has crossed 
the wide-spread ocean to find, on the soil of free and enlightened 
Massachusetts, a stage for the reenactraent of its terrible trage- 
dies ? And even on the page of history, sober and truth-telling 
history, softened and palliated as it may be by some fond and 
filial hand, it will still overtop the level of ordinary incident, 
and cast a deep shade over our brightest and proudest achieve- 
ments. 

In behalf, then, of this ancient Commonwealth, — unused to 
any association but with the great and generous of the earth; — 
in behalf of her living children, and in behalf of her dead 
fathers, whose names will be alike bound up with that of the 
State itself, for honor or dishonor, for glory or shame, in all 
future time ; — I invoke this House to do something to rescue 
her from this otherwise inevitable reproach. 



THE TESTIMONY OF INFIDELS. 

A SPEECH DELIVERED IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES OF MASSA- 
CHUSETTS, FEBRUARY 11, 1836. 



Allow me, Mr. Speaker, before entering upon the discussion 
of the general merits of the bill under consideration, to set the 
House right with regard to the laws of Connecticut upon this 
subject. That State has long enjoyed a most enviable reputa- 
tion for holding fast to that which is good. And it was not, I 
confess, without some alarm that I heard her example appealed 
to in favor of the bill. But upon subsequent investigation, I 
am entirely willing that her example should be followed. She 
has passed no such law. Her last statute upon the subject, 
the statute of 1830, has carried her not a jot beyond the point 
at which our common law now stands. It declares every man 
to be a competent witness who believes in a Supreme Being, 
and our courts have declared the same. 

But I wish not to rest my opposition to this bill upon either 
example or authority ; much less am I disposed to defend the 
present rule of law, merely because it happens to be an ancient 
rule. I agree with the gentleman from Gloucester, (Mr. Ran- 
toul,) that principles are none the better for their antiquity. 
But let me remind him, too, that they are none the worse either. 
Let me remind him that there are at least two classes of minds 
in this House, with reference to this matter of antiquity. And 
that, while some may be disposed to adhere too blindly and 
cling too closely to whatever is old or established, adopting, as 
he says, the maxim of the poet -— " Whatever is, is right," — 



188 THE TESTIMONY OF INFIDELS. 

there are others who leap a little too easily to the opposite of 
whatever is old and established, adopting, as their motto, the 
very reverse of that maxim — "Whatever is, is wrong." Sir, 
there are men here who seem to find their sole and sufTicient 
reason for attacking any principle or any practice, in the mere 
fact that it did not originate in their day, or was not the off- 
spring of their own brain; — who, while they profess great re- 
spect for the wisdom of their fathers, place no dependence upon 
any but their own; — who seem to consider our Government, its 
institutions and its principles, free, prosperous, and pure though 
they be, as the subjects, — not of the whole people's sober en- 
joyment, but of their own fanciful experiments ; and who hunt 
out the imperfections which are inseparable from all human 
works, with the same eagerness and zeal with which sportsmen 
run down their game, — not for any advantage to others, but 
only to enjoy their own agility and skill. 

For one. Sir, I care not in what age, before the flood or since, 
any practice or any principle drew breath, or with what barbarous 
systems it was once intermingled ; if it be good in itself, and 
works well in our own system, it is all that can be asked. Our 
own Massachusetts Bill of Rights contains more than one arti- 
cle from an instrument more than six hundred years old, and 
almost in the very words in which it was extorted from the lips 
of King John at Runnymede by his brave though barbarous 
barons. But do we rely on those articles any the less confi- 
dently on that account, or sleep any the less soundly under their 
protecting influence ? 

But there is one thing which antiquity affords, which even the 
gentleman himself must acknowledge to be valuable, — experi- 
ence — experience — a teacher compared with which the brain- 
spun theories of men are but stumbling-blocks and foolishness ; 
and let me say that neither industry nor ingenuity have been 
able to torture from her any response in favor of this bill. 

And now, Mr. Speaker, I beg leave to recall the attention of 
the House to the real reason of the existing rule of law as to 
this inquiry into a man's religious belief, as it is falsely called. 
Gentlemen seem to regard it as an independent and arbitrary 
rule, established for no other purpose than to exclude atheists 



THE TESTIMONY OF INFIDELS. 189 

from the witness-stand. This is wholly false. An atheist is 
not excluded simply because he is an atheist. There is another 
most material and massy link in the chain which shuts him out. 
The rule of law is now, and has been for centuries, that no tes- 
timony shall be received in courts of justice except under the 
sanction of an oath ; — a rule which has never been relaxed ex- 
cept in favor of the Quakers, whose conscientious scruples about 
oaths have stood the test of two centuries of trial, and, during 
a part of the time, of the sharpest persecution. But an atheist 
cannot take an oath, and that, not because he has any con- 
scientious scruples about swearing, but because he has no God 
to swear by. There is nothing in his breast upon which the 
obligations of an oath can take hold. Its terms are wholly 
unmeaning to him — its sanctions wholly unbinding upon him. 
He cannot, therefore, as he must, if he give it at all, give testi- 
mony under oath. It is the oath, then, and not his religious 
belief, which excludes him. 

And here. Sir, I advance this proposition, — that so long as 
oaths are administered in our courts, so long it is essential to 
the ends of justice that this right of inquiry should be main- 
tained ; and so long it is the religious duty of society to main- 
tain it. Why, what is an oath, and in what consists the taking 
of an oath ? Is it the mere stepping upon a stand to be seen of 
men, the assumption of an arbitrary attitude, and the repetition 
of a formula of words to render one liable to the pains and 
penalties of perjury ? I fear it is too often considered so. I 
have often regretted the hasty and careless manner in which 
oaths are administered and taken. I have often desired that 
some change might be made, which would assign to the taker 
something more than a mere raising of the hand and a bending 
of the head. But what is an oath ? It is a religious obligation, 
and, in taking it, a man is supposed to lift himself above the 
level of men, and to speak, as it were, in the presence of God, — 
to raise, not only his hand, but his heart, to heaven, — to invoke 
the attestation of God to truth, and to imprecate his vengeance 
upon falsehood. 

Seriously considered. Sir, there is no more awful act per- 
formed by man on earth than this. No form of prayer or of 



190 THE TESTIMONY OF INFIDELS. 

sacrament surpasses it in solemnity. And is it not the right, 
then, is it not the imperative duty, of society, to take good heed 
that it be not lightly or vainly administered ? Nay, does not 
society make its officers, (and through them, itself.) not only 
witnesses, but parties, to the most shocking mockery, to the 
most profane blasphemy, by suffering oaths to be administered 
to those who deny the existence of the God in whose name 
they are couched ? 

Gentlemen will tell me, that the second section of this bill 
will provide against such an event. But wide as that section 
reaches, extraordinary and extravagant as its provisions are, 
allowing every man to affirm who may object to being sworn, 
whether his objection arise from conscience or from caprice, 
whether from a weak superstition, or from a wicked design to 
escape the imprecation of Divine wrath upon a deliberate and 
premeditated perjury, — it does not go far enough to prevent the 
profanation to which I have referred. 

Suppose, Sir, a bold and barefaced infidel, an open and notori- 
ous infidel, to be summoned as a witness in our courts, and that, 
declining to avail himself of the privilege of the second section 
of this bill, and resisting all inquiry into his religious belief under 
the first, he should insist, for the mere purpose of ridiculing 
religion and mocking God, or for any other reason you choose, on 
having the oath administered to him, — is there any thing in this 
bill, or out of it, if the bill passes, to hinder him from doing so ? 
Nothing. And if gentlemen tell me that I suppose an extreme 
case, I reply that it is an extreme case in more senses of the 
word than one, and that the very possibility of its occurrence 
ought to be scrupulously guarded against. And to this end, 
until all oaths are abolished, the right of inquiry which this bill 
proposes to do away, must be preserved. 

Again, Sir, I maintain that the right of inquiry is essential to 
the ends of justice. Why are oaths administered at all ? Is it 
not because they are believed to have peculiar efficacy to elicit 
and extort truth from those who might otherwise speak falsely ? 
And is it not a mere imposition on both judges and jury, and a 
most gross injustice to those interested in any suit, to introduce 
testimony under the form of an oath, without giving them the 



THE TESTIMONY OF INFIDELS. 191 

means of knowing whether it were taken by one who was capa- 
ble of feeling its force, or by one to whom it was mere mum- 
mery and jargon ? And how but by this very inquiry can such 
knowledge be ascertained? I repeat the proposition, then, 
that while oaths continue to be administered, it is essential to 
the ends of justice, as well as a religious duty of society, to 
maintain the right of making this inquiry. If the second sec- 
tion of this bill be adopted, it is not difficult to foresee that 
oaths will be in a considerable degree discontinued in our courts, 
but if the first section prevail they ought forthwith to be entirely 
abolished. 

And here, Mr. Speaker, we are brought to the question, 
whether we are willing, either in whole or in part, to give up 
oaths as the instruments of investigation in our courts of jus- 
tice? Are we ready to substitute, as the sanctions of testimony 
on which not only the properties, but the liberties and lives of 
men may depend, the uncertain and merely momentary penal- 
ties of man, for the sure and fearful looking-for of Divine judg- 
ment ? I appeal to those who haply may be something more 
than witnesses in our courts, — to those who, by some turn of 
fortune, by some sudden heat of passion in their own breasts, or 
of prejudice or persecution in the breasts of others, may, as any 
one of us may, stand one day or other at the bar of their coun- 
try, with the awful issue to be determined whether they shall 
stand next at the bar of their God. Are they quite willing to 
take men as they come, under the influence of such motives as 
happen to be uppermost in their minds, and to unseal those lips 
upon which the name of the God of Truth never rested but in 
derision or as a curse ? For myself. Sir, I must bow to the de- 
cision of the majority, but I protest while I can, against one 
hair of my head being harmed, against one day of my life be- 
ing cut off or doomed to darkness, upon the mock oath or even, 
the conscientious affirmation of an atheist. I must be par- 
doned. Sir, if I put no faith in him who puts no faith in his 
God, — if I refuse to risk all that is valuable to me here, upon 
the word of one who knows nothing valuable hereafter. It may 
be called bigotry or intolerance, or what you please. When I 
regard infidefity as a state of mind wholly independent of the 



192 THE TESTIMONY OF INFIDELS. 

will, I may feel differently disposed. Now it seems to me to 
be wilful and wanton. There is nothing more beautiful in the 
system of Providence, nothing more worthy of the devout grati- 
tude of man, than that God has so adapted the Gospel of his Son, 
and the knowledge of Himself, to the nature and the necessities 
of the human heart. It is against man's reason, it is against 
his instincts to deny or disbelieve them. And it seems as if 
such disbelief or denial could result, at some stage or other of 
its existence, from nothing but a perverse shutting of the eyes 
and the ears to those streams of light and those sounds of truth, 
which come up alike from every pore of nature and from every 
page of revelation. Or perhaps. Sir, I may be more charitable 
in this respect, when I consider the belief in a Supreme Being 
as having no efficacy to promote purity of life or truth of lan- 
guage, — when I regard atheism as having no concern with a 
man's character for truth and veracity. Now I consider it as 
the very test and criterion of that character, or rather as that 
character itself. 

I speak generally. Sir, and not without remembering that 
there are exceptions to all rules. And I was particularly struck 
with the paragraph from Washington's Farewell Address, which 
my friend from Newbury read to us the other day, as contain- 
ing a clear and true statement of both the rule and the excep- 
tions. After asking, as he emphatically does, " where is the 
security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of reli- 
gious obligation desert the oaths which are the instruments of 
investigation in courts of justice?" he proceeds, "let us with 
caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained 
without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence 
of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason 
and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality 
can prevail in exclusion of religious principle." As if he had 
said, whatever may be the influence of refined education on the 
Humes, the Gibbons, the Jeffersons, (if, indeed, Jefferson is to 
be so classed, as I am by no means ready to admit,) — whatever 
may be the influence of refined education upon minds of this 
peculiar structure, the morality of men in general can only result 
from religious principle, preceded, of course, by religious belief. 



THE TESTIMONY OF INFIDELS. 193 

But the gentleman from Gloucester has put to the House a 
puzzling interrogatory relative to the opinion that belief and 
disbelief are not altogether independent of the will, and has 
called upon us, if this be so, to will ourselves into a belief that 
he is five-and-seventy feet high I Well, Sir, I call upon him, in 
return, to be good enough to reason himself into such a belief, 
or to get at it in any way independent of the will. None but 
a madman certainly could ever entertain the idea. There is one 
step, however, which any man might take towards it; — he 
might will to say that he believed so. And if such a belief is to 
be considered analogous to a disbelief in deity, it only proves that 
disbelief ought rather to be called denial, and that there is really 
no such being as a sane, and yet sincere and conscientious infidel. 

But let us quit these abstractions and come back to the real 
questionbefore us. 

We are told, Mr. Speaker, and the gentleman from Gloucester 
has entered into an elaborate argument to prove, that the exist- 
ing rule of law is unconstitutional. A rule of law, Sir, which 
was in existence ages before the Constitution was adopted, — 
which has been in existence during the whole fifty years since it 
was adopted, — and which must have been, all along, well known 
and understood by the Convention who framed, and by the People 
who ratified that Constitution, — has at length in this day, and 
almost in this very hour, been discovered to be wholly at war 
with the true spirit and just construction of that sacred instru- 
ment! Parsons, Lowell, Sewall, Cushing, who afterwards so 
ably presided, Adams, Strong, Sullivan, Lincoln, who both 
before and afterwards so largely practised, in our highest courts, 
and to whom the rules of evidence were as familiar as house- 
hold words, — they all failed to comprehend, or forgot to vindi- 
cate, the principles of that Bill of Rights, which they had 
themselves so carefully framed! Mr. Speaker, the argument 
will not even bear to be stated ; it perishes in the very utter- 
ance. Sir, there were brave men before Agamemnon. There 
were wise men before Solomon. And it is not too much to say, 
that there were men who could construe our Constitution and 
comprehend our liberties, before even the gentleman from Glou- 
cester or myself. Yes, Sir, to use the language of Edmund 

17 



194 THE TESTIMONY OF INFIDELS. 

Burke, true ideas of liberty " were understood long before we 
were born, altogether as well as they will be after the grave has 
heaped its mould upon our presumption, and the silent tomb 
shall iiave imposed its law on our pert loquacity." 

But, waiving an answer which to my mind is so conclusive, 
the t^entleman has himself furnished us with a weapon which 
is equally fatal to his constitutional argument. He has re- 
minded us of that, indeed, which we all probably remembered 
for ourselves, that up to the year 1820 there existed a provision 
in our Constitution, that no man should enter these Halls of 
Legislation without making a previous declaration of his belief 
in the Christian Religion ; — a provision which, for one, I heartily 
regret was ever struck out from that instrument. Well, now, 
Sir, the first and second articles of the Bill of Rights, upon which 
his argument has been mainly based, are entirely unchanged; 
they are precisely and literally the same as when they were 
first ratified by the people. These articles at their adoption, then, 
were entirely consistent with the religious test, as gentlemen in- 
sist upon calling it, which the Convention of 1820 abolished. 
No construction of them, certainly, is to be admitted, which 
would render them inconsistent with a provision which so long 
stood by their side, of equal authority and in the same instru- 
ment. And if they were consistent with this provision at their 
adoption, are they any the less so now ? If it were proposed to 
re-insert this provision, would any gentleman have the face to 
say that it was unconstitutional, or inconsistent with the existing 
provisions of the Constitution ? And if that declaration might 
still be required without any violation of the Bill of Rights, 
how much more such an expression of belief as the Bill before 
us would forbid ? 

I confess, Sir, I am at a loss to conceive how any man, who 
has ever read our Constitution as originally framed, or as it now 
exists, can listen a moment to such an argument. If any thing 
be clearer than another on its face, it is, that it was intended to 
constitute a Christian State. I deny totally the gentleman's 
position, that the religious expressions it contains were intended 
only to show forth the pious sentiments of those who framed it. 
They were intended to incorporate into our system the principles 



THE TESTIMONY OF INFIDELS. 195 

of Christianity, — principles which belonged not only to those who 
framed, but to the whole people who adopted it. Sir, the people 
of that day were a Christian people ; they adopted a Clnistian 
Constitution; they no more contemplated the existence of infi- 
delity than the Athenian laws provided against the perpetration 
of parricide. They established a Christian Commonwealth; 
they wrote upon its walls. Salvation, and upon its gates. Praise; 
and Christianity is as clearly now its corner-stone, as if the ini- 
tial letter of every page of our Statute Book, like that of some 
monkish manuscript, were illuminated with the figure of the 



Cross 



.- r 



And yet. Sir, we are told that it is a mere quibble to interpret 
the phrase, "religious sentiments," in the second article of the 
Bill of Rights, in any other way than " sentiments about reli- 
gion," — its truth or its falsity; and a gross equivocation not to 
admit atheists to be one of those " sects or denominations," of 
which " no subordination of any one to another shall ever be 
established by law! " Why, Mr. Speaker, if these views of our 
Constitution be correct, how is it that yonder Chaplain is suffered, 
morning after morning, to lift his voice in prayer in this hall, and 
to invoke the blessing of the Christian's God upon us and upon 
our labors ? How is it that, week after week, a day is set aside 
for the worship of that God, and its solemn observance enjoined 
and enforced by our laws ? How is it that profane and blas- 
phemous words or writings concerning that God and his Gospel 
are punished as crimes against the State? Nay, the very sys- 
tem of oaths Avhich our Constitution itself prescribes as the 
passports to every office which it creates, — why are they not 
abolished as interfering with the "unalienable rights" of man? 
Gentlemen seem to think that, because the declaration of belief 
in the Christian Religion is not now required in order to obtain 
admittance within these seats, there is no longer any exclu- 
sion. But^ the oath still remains, and there is no provision by 
which any person but Quakers can be permitted to affirm. It is 
clear then, that all persons except Quakers, who from any cause 
are incapable of taking an oath, are incompetent to the offices 
of government. They may, indeed, chicane themselves into 
them. They may go through the forms of the oath, and as 



196 THE TESTIMONSr OF INFIDELS. 

the Constitution now stands, perhaps no man can gainsay or 
resist them. But they must enjoy the satisfaction of knowing, 
that they violate the spirit and intent of the Constitution, in 
the very act by which they bind tliemselves to support it. 

And here let me say, to those who so rigidly maintain the doc- 
trine that the inquiry into a man's religious belief, which this 
Bill proposes to abolish, is an interference between a man and 
his Maker, (a plea, by the way, which no atheist certainly will pre- 
sume to set up for himself, since he acknowledges no Maker,) — 
that the oath itself to which this inquiry is previous, is a ten- 
fold greater interference, and that they take their exception 
at the wrong place. An oath is an acknowledgment of God. 
A compulsory oath is a compulsory acknowledgment of God. 
And those who submit to the administration of an oath, and yet 
refuse to submit to the previous inquiry, may fairly be said to 
" strain at a gnat and swallow a camel." 

But it is a test. Well, Sir, and what if it is ? I do not know 
that a thing is any the worse in itself for having an odious 
name applied to it. I admit that it is a test. And if gentlemen 
point me to the persecution and oppression of which tests have 
been the instruments in other ages and other climes, all I can say 
is, that this is not such a test. Because things may bear the 
same appellation, they are not necessarily the same or similar 
things, any more than it follows, because the gentleman from 
Gloucester and myself were christened alike, that he and I 
should necessarily advocate the same doctrines, or that I should 
be gifted with the same ingenuity and eloquence that he is. It 
is a test. But it is not a religious test, any more than it is a 
chemical test. It is a test of a man's capacity to take an oath, 
and that is the beginning, middle, and end of the whole matter. 

Mr. Speaker, it seems to me that under the present system of 
oaths, this test, instead of being a persecution and oppression of 
an atheist, is a positive protection and favor to him, enabling 
him to escape from a ceremonial acknowledgment of a God in 
whom he does not believe. And why any Christian should ob- 
ject to it, I confess I am at a loss to conceive. There seems to 
be a morbid and mawkish sensibility in some men's minds upon 
this and other subjects, which if the law should regard, instead of 



r 



THE TESTIMONY OF INFIDELS. 197 

being as it is sometimes called, the perfection of human reason, 
it would become the mere patchwork of human whims. 

But, says the gentleman from Cambridge, as the rule now 
stands, the atheist is an outlaw. From what right, Sir, or what 
privilege ? I had generally supposed that to be a witness was 
an unpleasant and onerous duty, from which men were not sorry 
to be exempt. But an atheist may be murdered in the streets, 
or assassinated, or assaulted, when none but atheists arc near, and 
how shall justice be administered in his behalf? Why, so may 
a Christian be injured or killed under precisely the same circum- 
stances. And if the atheist be therefore an outlaw, we are all 
outlaws. You and I, Sir, may need the testimony of atheists as 
much as any of their own tribe. For myself, I am content to 
take the risk. But admitting that there may be some cases in 
which the rule will work hardly upon the atheist exclusively, 
whose fault is it ? Who outlaws him ? Has society withheld 
from him any of those means of religious knowledge and edu- 
cation which she has so liberally provided for others ? Has God 
denied to him those inlets of truth and those influences of 
grace, which he has so freely bestowed upon the rest of his child- 
ren ? But I refrain from a topic on which I have already ex- 
pressed an opinion. 

It is a little curious, Mr. Speaker, that so much of this debate 
upon a subject so closely connected with the practice of our 
Courts, should have been taken up with a discussion of abstract 
principles. At the outset of the debate, indeed, nothing but 
these abstract principles was relied on in favor of the bill. Gen- 
tlemen s;ave us an abundance of " wise saws," but no " modern 
instances;" nor, indeed, ancient ones either, though the annals 
of infidelity seemed to have been raked back for centuries. Dur- 
ing the last day or two, however, the discussion has assumed 
rather a more practical cast. And the friends of the Bill have 
exhibited to us some cases of the bad operation of the present 
rule. But, Sir, with one or two trivial and wholly unimportant 
exceptions, the cases are all supposed cases ; the facts are all 
imaginary facts; the evils are all invented evils. And what is 
there under the sun, which will stand against such arguments? 
There is nothing so pure, nothing so holy, nothing so useful, no- 
17* 



198 THE TESTIJIONY OP INFIDELS. 

thing of such good report on earth or, I had almost said, in 
Heaven, which an ingenious imagination, which a subtle inven- 
tion, may not, — I do not say merely, find fault with, and pick 
flaws in, — but which they may not show up in such a deformed, 
distorted, and monstrous shape, as to startle every one whom 
they address. And, Sir, if we are to yield ourselves up to the 
influence of such suggestions, we shall " subtilize ourselves into 
savages." Our ship of state, instead of holding on that high 
career of Constitutional liberty, which now lies open before it, 
will be swung otf upon a sea of speculation, — the sport of 
every wind of doctrine and every wave of opinion, which may 
blow or beat upon her sides. 

Mr. Speaker, I have already dwelt too long upon a subject 
which had been wellnigh exhausted before I gained the floor. 
Yet I cannot conclude without alluding to some remarks which 
fell from the gentleman from Gloucester at the very open- 
ing of the debate, and which yesterday received some notice 
from the gentleman from Newburyport. I refer to his com- 
ments upon a recent charge of one of the Judges of our Su- 
preme Court. I understood him to say, that the learned Judge 
used language of this sort, — that, if any man entertained doubts 
or a disbelief of the Christian Religion, he ought to keep such 
sentiments to himself. And the gentleman has inferred from this 
lano-uacje, that the Judge would recommend hypocrisy to the 
people, and perhaps, therefore, would not shrink from practising 
it himself. Sir, if any such inference may fairly and reasonably 
be drawn, I freely submit myself, in company with the learned 
Judse, to whatever censure it involves. I indorse the sentiment, 
if it be not presumption so to speak, and adopt it as my own. 
I hold it to be the duty, the moral, the social duty, (and to such 
a man there can be no higher,) of every one who may have fallen 
into such a state of mind, to conceal it, I had almost said, even 
from himself. Nay, further, I maintain that any intelligent man, 
whose mind has thus been turned back from its highest and 
noblest object of knowledge and devotion, but who still sees 
clearly, as any intelligent man must see, the infinite blessings 
which Christianity has bestowed upon mankind, the comforts 
and joys in life, the consolation and hopes in death, which it has 



THE TESTIMONY OF INFIDELS. 199 

afforded to thd individual man, the civilization, refinement, peace, 
prosperity, and freedom which it has i^iven to the world at lar^e 
— yes, freedom. Sir, — for under what other auspices than those 
of the Gospel, have the rights of men been most successfully 
asserted and maintained? — at what other beams than those of 
the Sun of Righteousness was our own loved star of liberty 
first kindled into being and brilliancy? — any intelligent man, 
I repeat, who, seeing all this, can yet go about preaching up 
and making proselytes to his own accursed infidelity, — how- 
ever he may have the image of God upon his brow, can have 
nothing but the spirit of a demon in his breast. 
I hope the House will reject the Bill. 



% 



Pr.OTECTION TO DOMESTIC INDUSTRY. 

A SPEECH DELIVERED IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES OF MASSA- 

CHU^TTS, FEBRUARY 15, 1837. 



I HAVE hinted, Mr. Speaker, more than once in the course of 
this debate, while expressing my views of the various amend- 
ments which have been offered to the paper on your table, that 
I might trouble the House with a few remarks upon the general 
question, whenever that question should come up. It is now 
before as. The proposed amendments have all been rejected, 
and the original resolutions, in the form in which they first 
came from the committee-room, unmutilated and unaltered, 
are now awaiting our ultimate action. I confess. Sir, that I 
had expected, in this stage of the question, to see some re- 
demption of the pledges which were so abundantly given out 
when the subject was introduced into the House. I had ex- 
pected that those who Avere so eager and so bold to throw down 
the gauntlet of defiance at the outset of this busint^ss, and to 
cast such unmeasured terms of contumely and contempt upon 
the principles which these resolutions embody, would have 
favored us, at this point of the controversy, with something 
beside hard words, gratuitous assertions, or even jocular sallies 
to quarrel with. But though every opportunity has been af- 
forded, and almost every provocation offered, though the gaunt- 
let originally thrown down has not only thrice been taken up, 
but fearlessly and repeatedly brandished in the very eyes of those 
from wliom it fell, no champion of free trade has yet appeared 
in the lists, and, so far as the principles of the Protecting Sys- 
tem are concerned, we are still left to make battle upon an 
imaginary foe. Sir, I have no disposition to protract this one- 
sided contest. I willl not conjure up shapes of opposition. I 



I 



PROTECTION TO DOMESTIC INDUSTRY. 201 

will not enter gratuitously upon the dull discussion of abstract 
principles, or the dry narration of statistical details. Whatever 
pains I may have taken in preparation for such a task, I gladly 
forget; — whatever satisfaction I may have anticipated in the 
performance of it, I willingly forego. I will only pray the pa- 
tience of the House for a few minutes, while, quitting the path 
which I had marked out for myself in advance, burning my 
books, blotting out my figures, and religiously eschewing all 
entertainment of abstract principles, I take up the question 
where I find it this morning, or rather where the gentleman 
from Gloucester left it yesterday. 

Sir, I understood that gentleman (Mr. Rantoul) to say, in 
reply to the honorable member from Nantucket, (Mr. Burnell,) 
who had ventured to introduce the names of John Hancock and 
Samuel Adams into this discussion, that could those sacred 
shades be summoned, at this moment, from their abode, they 
would be among the first and foremost to protest against the 
unconstitutional system of taxation which these resolutions 
support and advocate, — that they would resist it in the same 
tones and in the same spirit in which they once resisted the 
tyrannical taxation of Great Britain. It would be easy, Mr. 
Speaker, to argue out, to almost any length, the countless dis- 
tinctions between the Tarifll'of our own Congress and the taxa- 
tion without representation imposed upon the American Colo- 
nies by a British Parliament. But I propose to answer this 
singular position by no such process. I propose to confine my- 
self, on this point of the question, to the simple recital of one 
or two authentic anecdotes, which I am sure will not be unin- 
teresting in themselves, and which are worth a brainful of argu- 
ments upon this precise issue. They are not new, Sir. I can 
claim no credit for having hunted them out from the heap of 
forgotten history. The research of others has done this, and 
the eloquence of others has embalmed them beyond all danger 
of future oblivion. But so entirely pertinent are they to the 
remark of the gentleman from Gloucester, and to the whole 
question before us, that I trust I shall be pardoned the plagia- 
rism, if such it ought to be called, of relating them on this occa- 
sion, as nearly as I can remember, in the form in which I have 
found them elsewhere. 



202 PROTECTION TO DOMESTIC INDUSTRY. 

The Protecting System an unconstitutional system, and John 
Hancock and Samuel Adams rising from their graves to resist 
it! Let us go back in imagination, Mr. Speaker, about three- 
and-fifty years. Let us transport ourselves to the scenes and 
the circumstances of that distant day. The War of the Revo- 
lution is ended. The banners of liberty are at last waving in 
triumph over the fields upon which they have so often drooped 
in blood. The strife, the clash, the groan, the shout, are all 
over. But not so the private distress and the public depression. 
These, if not absolutely greater than during the heat of the 
war, are certainly more severely felt. No all-absorbing excite- 
ment drives them from the thought, — no all-animating hope 
alleviates them to the feeling. That hope is realized, and the 
fruition has commenced. 

The Atlantic seaboard is the principal scene of this distress, 
and the ship-owners, the ship-builders, and the various classes 
of mechanics to which commerce gives support, are the princi- 
pal suflerers. They are all destitute of employment, and some 
of them of bread. British ships are entering their ports daily 
and are deeply laden with British goods, but their own ships 
and their own goods have neither protection at home nor free 
trade abroad. There is no power under the existing confedera- 
tion to adopt a general system of imposts, nor can any indi- 
vidual State successfully establish such a system for itself. Un- 
der these circumstances the idea of a Voluntary Association, 
which had been so effective in the days of the Stamp Act and 
the Tea Tax, is proposed, and a public meeting is held on the 
subject by the merchants and ship-builders of Boston. A Com- 
mittee is appointed to draft an address to the people, and they 
are expressly instructed to call upon them, in the strongest 
terms, not to buy or consume any articles which were imported 
in British ships. And who is the Chairman of the Committee 
to whom this work is intrusted? It is John Hancock, Sir, — 
the same who is now summoned from his grave to protest 
against the abominable policy of a Protecting System. 

The address is drafted, the appeal is made, and the me- 
chanics of Boston are now assembled to respond to it. They 
cordially concur in the doctrines of the merchants, — they agree 



PROTECTION TO DOMESTIC INDUSTRY. 203 

to the principle that American shipping ought to be protected, 
and that British goods ought not to be bought or consumed 
when imported in British ships. But they do not stop here. 
They are for carrying the system of protection a step farther, 
and they insist, in their turn, that these British goods ought not 
to be bought or consumed at all. " For," say they, " Mr. Han- 
cock, what difference does it make to us, whether hats, shoes, 
boots, shirts, handkerchiefs, tin-ware, brass-ware, cutlery, and 
every other article, come in British ships or come in your ships ; 
since, in whatever ships they come, they take away our means 
of living." It does not appear, Mr. Speaker, what answer was 
given by Mr. Hancock to this pregnant interrogatory. I know 
not what answer he could have given but one of assent and 
approbation. At all events we see him here one of the earliest 
advocates of a protecting policy ; and who can doubt that could 
the conjuration of the gentleman from Gloucester summon him 
out of his grave in the faith in which he went down into it, he 
would be found so still? But let us turn to another scene, and 
another character. 

Let us come down, Sir, to the beginning of the year 1788. 
The Constitution of the United States is in the process of 
adoption. Four or five States have already given it their 
sanction, bat as many more are required to carry it into ope- 
ration. The decision in other States is extremely doubtful, and 
nowhere more so than in Massachusetts, whose Convention 
is now in session. John Hancock, it is well known, is Pre- 
sident of this Convention, but Samuel Adams also is a con- 
spicuous member. He is naturally of a cautious and doubting 
disposition, and has many fears of the practicability and safety 
of the proposed form of government. The whole weight of his 
name and character are consequently arrayed at the outset 
against its adoption, when suddenly a change comes over his 
views, and is visible in his conduct. The mechanics of Boston 
have held a meeting at the Green Dragon. They have passed 
resolutions. They have sent those resolutions to Mr. Adams by 
the hand of Paul Revere. " How many mechanics," says Mr. 
Adams, " were there at the Green Dragon when these resolu- 
tions were adopted?" "More than the Green Dragon could 
hold." « And where were the rest ? " « In the streets." " And 



204 PROTECTION TO DOMESTIC INDUSTRY. 

how many were there hi the streets ? '• " More than there are 
stars in the sky." I see before me, jNIr. Speaker, one of the very 
mechanics who met at the Green Dragon on this eventful occa- 
sion. My venerable friend and colleague (Zachariah Hicks) 
was not merely a witness but a party to this scene. He was a 
Whiar in that dav, as he is in this. And what were the resolu- 
tions which he assisted in passing ? They declared that, if the 
Constitution were adopted, " trade and navigation would revive 
and increase, and employ and subsistence be afforded to many 
of the townsmen then sufiering for the want of the necessaries 
of life," while, on 'the contrary, should the Constitution be re- 
jected, '• the small remains of commerce yet left would be anni- 
hilated — the various trades and handicrafts dependent thereon 
decay ; the poor be increased, and many worthy and skilful me- 
chanics be compelled to seek employ and subsistence in strange 
lands." These were the doctrines of the mechanics of that day; 
— these were the hopes which they entertained in advocating 
the adoption of the Constitution ; — encouragement to their own 
labor and protection from foreign competition. And partly, at 
least, under the influence of these doctrines and these hopes, 
thus expressed and thus conveyed, Samuel Adams abandons all 
opposition to the Constitution, and John Hancock unites with 
him in its favor. There is no longer any doubt; the question 
is decided; and Massachusetts gives, as it were, the very casting 
vote in favor of the Constitution. The example of conciliatory 
moderation which she sets, in proposing amendments to be 
acted on after its adoption instead of before, is followed by other 
States, and the ratification is soon complete. And yet we are 
now told. Sir, that Samuel Adams and John Hancock, could 
they rise from the dead, would be among the first and foremost 
to protest against the Protecting System as an unconstitutional 
system of taxation I 

Mr. Speaker, the anecdotes which I have related do not 
simply demonstrate the absurdity of this idea. They do not 
only prove to us which side these distinguished persons, if per- 
mitted to revisit this scene of their patriotic labors, would take 
in the questions before us. They also exhibit to us distinctly 
the circumstances and the sentiments under which the Constitu- 
tion of the United States was adopted, and the immediate ad- 



PROTECTION TO DOMESTIC INDUSTRY. 205 

vantages which were expected from its adoption. Compare, 
now, these two incidents together ; look at the cause of the de- 
pression and distress which pervaded the country, as explained 
in the first, and at the remedy which was prescribed and adminis- 
tered in the last, and then add a single other fact to yom- view — 
a fact, which the published statutes of the country attest, — 
that the very first Revenue Act which was adopted by Congress 
after the Constitution went into operation, contained in its pre- 
amble the express declaration, that the duties it imposed were 
laid not only for the support of government and the discharge 
of the public debts, but for the encouragement and protection 
of manufactures; — and then give sentence with me, Sir, as to 
the unconstitutionality of this system of taxation! 

But let me turn from argument to authority upon this point. 
The gentleman told us the other day that Daniel Webster 
once asserted the unconstitutionality of the Tariff. Now, it is 
true, I believe, Mr. Speaker, that this distinguished statesman 
did venture to say, some twenty years ago, in the deliberate 
form of a Caucus Speech, that, as an priginal question, — the 
practice of government set aside, — the power of Congress to lay 
duties for protection was, in his opinion, a more doubtful one 
than that to expend money in Internal Improvements. Some- 
thing of this sort he has himself confessed. But, most for- 
tunately. Sir, he has also confessed under what influence it was 
that he resolved these doubts, — at the feet of what Gamaliel he 
unlearned this opinion. It was James Madison, we are told, 
who satisfied Mr. Webster on this point, so far as the practice 
of government had left it an open question — James Madison — 
whose opinions, I had supposed to be the very scale and stand- 
ard of true, old-fashioned Republicanism. The vaunted demo- 
cracy of the present day, it seems, is seeking newer lights, and 
it is welcome to the whole benefit of their brilliancy. But there 
are those in this House, and a majority, too, I believe, who de- 
sire no better authority, on this subject at least, than that of 
James Madison, and who will rest their belief in the constitu- 
tionality of the Tariff on his opinions, without any fear or any 
misgiving. 

But the anecdotes which I have related have still another ap- 
18 



206 PROTECTION TO DOMESTIC INDrSTRY. 

plication. They teach us, Sir, what class of our citizens were 
most deeply interested in that general system of imposts which 
the Constitution established, and in the encouragement and 
protection of manufactures which that system was intended to 
involve. They teach us tcJiose " means of living were taken 
away " by the free importation of British goods and the free 
entry of British ships, and who " would be compelled to seek 
employ and subsistence in strange lands '' unless the power of 
regulating trade and protecting manufactures were conferred 
upon the general government. And, ]Mr. Speaker, it is now as 
it was then. It is not the rich capitalists and corporations, who 
are so artfully chimed upon in every other sentence of Mr. Cam- 
breleng's Report, and to whom the people of the country are 
falsely represented as paying an involuntary and odious tribute, 
— no, Sir, it is the artisan, the mechanic, and the tradesfolk, 
who will suffer before all others and more than all others if the 
protecting system be abolished. It is the wages and earnings 
of the laboring poor which will be affected first and affected 
most by such a step. It is one of the blessings which this 
country has hitherto enjoyed, that the natural rate of wages is 
high, — higher than anywhere else on the face of the globe. 
The gentleman from Gloucester will not disagree with me in 
the position that this is a blessing, and that the condition of 
that country is most prosperous and most happy where labor 
receives the largest reward. But it is this same high rate of 
wages which makes us enter upon the manufacturing system to 
so great disadvantage. I find, in the last number of the Ameri- 
can Almanac, a statement which speaks volumes on this subject. 
That excellent periodical contains a table of the average wages 
of all persons employed in the Cotton manufacture, in almost 
every country where the Cotton manufacture exists. It is as 
follows : — 

In India — from 1 to 2 shillings sterling per week. 

In Saxony — 2.-^. 6d. 

In Austria — 3s. 9d. 

In Switzerland — 45. 5d. 

In France — os. Gel. 

In England — about lOx. sometimes 12.<;. 

IX THE UXITED STATES — about 14*-. 11(7. 



PROTECTION TO DOMESTIC INDUSTRY. 207 

I know no reason, Sir, for supposing that this disparity is 
confined to the wages of those employed in the manufacture of 
cotton ; — every reason, on the other hand, for believing it to run 
through the whole range of human labor. Indeed, we need no 
statistical tables to teach us this fact. The unebbing tide of 
immigration which is daily flinging upon our shores such masses 
of life and limb, proves to us beyond all doubt, tha^there is 
something in our condition which Labor will leave home and 
kindred and country to obtain. Nor are we at a loss to account 
for this thriving condition of American labor. To say nothing 
of moral, social, or political causes, — the cheapness, fertility, and 
abundance of our Western lands, holding out to the laborer a 
temptation, which nothing but a rate of wages bearing some 
degree of equality to the certain profits of his own produce 
upon that luxuriant soil can check or counteract, is alone suffi- 
cient to explain it. — But I find myself departing from my pro- 
mise to abstain from abstract discussion. I will only repeat my 
conviction, that it is labor more than any other element in our 
manufacturing capacities, which demands protection of the 
government ; that it is labor which has hitherto received the 
greatest share of that protection which the Tariff has been ar- 
ranged to afford ; and that it is labor which must bear the heavi- 
est burden of discouragement and loss whenever that protection 
is abandoned. The profits of capitalists and corporations ! De- 
pend upon it, Mr. Speaker, domestic competition will take care 
that these are not too high, and if there be not capital enough at 
home to furnish that competition, foreign capital will flow freely 
in to its aid. It is no part of the protecting system to prevent 
that kind of competition, nor does it in any considerable de- 
gree do so. But the competition of the half-clad, half-starved, 
and wholly uneducated labor of the Old World, with the well- 
dressed, well-fed, virtuous, and educated labor of our own land — 
a competition which, with but a slight tendency to elevate or 
improve the one, would have the certain effect of dragging down 
and degrading the other, — this the Protecting System does 
provide against, and God grant that such a provision may never 
be abandoned ! 

Mr. Speaker, the paper on your table has more than once been 



208 PROTECTION TO DOMESTIC INDUSTRY. 

denominated, both by its friends and foes, a confession of faith, 
and I am inclined to ascribe to the associations which this term 
always brings along with it, a good deal of that microscopic 
criticism which we have witnessed for a few days past. Sir, if 
by this term — a confession of faith — it only be intended that 
the paper contains propositions which ought to be believed before 
they ar^ assented to, it is as true of this as it is of every other 
document which is introduced within these walls. Bat if this 
appellation be intended to convey the idea that there is any 
thing theoretic or speculative, any thing abstract or abstruse, any 
thing of mere closet meditation or moonlight philosophy, about 
these Resolutions, I entirely dissent from the justice of the 
nomenclature. It is no such cobweb affair. Adam Smith and 
John Baptiste Say may be the very old and new Testament of 
Political Economy, and yet this Protest may be as true as either 
of them. It is a plain, practical statement of the effect of an 
existing law upon the business interests of the Commonwealth, 
and of the probable influence upon those interests of a pro- 
posed change in that law. It is rather a confession of ivorks, 
than a confession oi faith. It deals with what is done, with 
what is doing, and with what is proposed to be done. And no 
gentleman ought to be permitted, and depend upon it, Sir, no 
gentleman will be permitted by his constituents, to escape from 
the responsibility in which this question involves him, by shel- 
tering himself behind the antique armor, the rusty mail of ab- 
stract principles. 

Gentlemen who vote against these resolutions must take one 
of two courses. They must either adopt the opinion that what 
is called the Protecting System is falsely so called, that it is not 
necessary, that it protects nobody, that it does no good to the 
country generally, or to this Commonwealth in particular, and 
that its abandonment will injure nobody, — and in adopting 
such an opinion they will go counter to the doctrines of the 
very Report on which Mr. Cambreleng's Bill is based, to the 
sentiments of almost all the discreet and considerate men of all 
interests and all parties, and to the thousand evidences which 
our statistical tables, to say nothing of our own senses, are an- 
nually presenting us ; — or, admitting that the system deserves 



PROTECTION TO DOMESTIC INDUSTRY. 209 

its name, that it has protected American industry in general 
and the industry of Massachusetts particularly, that it has been 
a main spring in the prosperity of both our Commonwealth and 
our country, and that its abandonment would occasion a great 
diminution of that prosperity and a great depression of that 
industry, — they must confess themselves guilty of giving their 
voluntary sanction to these results, and of basely assenting, 
under some personal or political influence, to the sacrifice of 
the interests and property of the people. 

And who doubts that such a sacrifice would ensue ? Who 
doubts that if the manufacturing interests of the country were 
prematurely abandoned to their fate, not only millions of capi- 
tal would be sunk, but thousands of hands would be thrown 
out of employment, the wages of labor be everywhere reduced, 
the hands thus diverted from manufacturing occupations be 
forced into agricultural pursuits, the number of agricultural pro- 
ducers be thus increased, the number of consumers diminished, 
and the prices and profits of our farmers be cut down ? But 
even this is not all. There are hands, Sir, which, if taken away 
from the loom and the spindle, cannot be turned so readily to the 
plough or the spade. There are natural powers, too, which 
never tire in the work for which God has created them, but 
which will not consent to be made the sport of man's caprice. 
The factory girl and the water-fall which now lighten each 
other's labors and respond to each other's song, and together 
contribute so much to the prosperity and property of our Com- 
monwealth, — what but the Protecting System has called them 
into action, and under what other system can that action be 
maintained '.' 

And even that portion of our labor, thus wrested from its 
present employment, which is capable of being diverted into 
agricultural occupations, — where, think you, it will find those 
occupations ? On the barren and rocky soil of Massachusetts ? 
No, Sir. Anywhere but there. It will betake itself thousands 
of miles off; it will seek refuge in the rich valleys of the 
West ; the tide of domestic emigration, to which the manu- 
facturing policy of Massachusetts has been a bar, will be let 
flow, our population will begin to retrograde, and we shall be 

18* 



210 PROTECTION TO DOMESTIC INDUSTRY. 

driven back into that old colonial condition, when it having 
been discovered by the British Parliament " that the erecting 
manufactories in the colonies, tended to lessen their dependence 
on Great Britain," our hat-makers were put under restrictions, 
the manufacture of iron and steel was prohibited, our slitting 
mills, plating forges, and furnaces were declared common nui- 
sances, and even the best friends of our liberties in the mother 
country maintained that we ought not to be suffered to make 
a horseshoe or a hobnail for ourselves; — when the fish that 
hangs on yonder wall, and the acorn that forms the apex of our 
dome, were the emblems of our only staples, and when the 
Indian that still is pictured upon our arms, was roaming at will 
through our primeval forests. 

Let me not be thought. Sir, to allude to the fisheries with dis- 
respect. I like to look at yon time-honored emblem of the early 
industry and enterprise of our citizens. The simplicity of the 
fisherman has claims to our regard which have been endorsed 
by a higher than human authority. And there is something 
beside simplicity in his character. It was w^ell said by my ex- 
cellent friend from Nantucket, (Mr. Crardiner) the other day, 
that the Nantucket boys feared nothing and flinched from no- 
thing, for they had been taught from their youth to battle with 
the monsters of the deep. That little barren island. Sir, of 
which he spoke, is a perfect miracle on the face of creation. 
Without containing within its own limits, I believe, a single 
material for building, or rigging, or furnishing a ship, without 
even a decent harbor to float one in, it has yet done more for 
the commercial and navigating interests of the country than 
any other spot on its whole surface. Success to the fisheries 
wherever they may be, at either cape and on any coast, and 
may yonder emblem always be suspended before the eyes of 
the Representatives of Massachusetts, not only reminding them 
of past energy and enterprise, but representing itself one of 
their present most valuable staples! But I cannot regard with 
any less satisfaction, Mr. Speaker, those other emblems which 
are quartered and clustered around it, — the emblems of agricul- 
ture, of commerce, of education, religion, and justice, no. Sir, 
nor even that of the despised and neglected militia, — after all. 



PROTECTION TO DOMESTIC INDUSTRY. 211 

the only safeguard of a free State. And there is one, too, which 
is not yet among them, but which is even more distinguished 
by its absence, — the emblem of an industry which was not 
even in embryo when these fresh-looking walls were reared; 
of an industry which is still in its infancy, but whose infant step 
is even now a giant's stride ; which has done as much for the 
prosperity of our Commonwealth in its earliest youth, as others 
in their maturest age, and which, at the same time, instead 
of an envious and grasping rival to others, has proved itself 
their best patron and friend. Sir, the question now before us 
is, whether, so far as we are able to decide, this industry shall 
be cherished or crushed ; whether its emblem shall be permit- 
ted to take its place among our most honored insignia, or 
whether it shall be consigned anew to that obscurity to which 
British interests and British tyranny originally doomed it, and 
from which it is now so auspiciously emerging. For one. Sir, 
I desire that the escutcheon of my native State may be adorned 
with the emblems of every industry which can afford employ- 
ment to the faculties or reward to the enterprise of man ; of 
every art which can improve his condition or increase his happi- 
ness ; of every science which can give a higher reach to his 
intellect, or a wider range to his investigation ; of every institu- 
tion and every influence which can fit him for a better enjoyment 
of that glorious liberty which is his heritage here, or of that more 
" glorious liberty " which is his hope hereafter I The factories 
and the fisheries, agriculture and commerce, — they have no 
opposite nor even separate interests ; any more than the machine 
has a separate interest from the oil which destroys its friction, or 
the ship has a separate interest from the cargo which pays its 
freight. Alone, they may be crushed or broken. Alone, they 
are at the mercy of every change of domestic or foreign policy ; 
now stimulated by a war — now depressed by a peace — 
deranged by the mere breath of cabinets — disturbed, by the 
mere vapors of the press. Separate, and you may snap them 
at will. But bind them up in the same bundle of life, and 
place them in the firm talon of Liberty, and they will be strong 
in each other's strength, and will form, too, the brightest orna- 
ment and the best defence of that liberty itself. 



212 PROTECTIOX TO DOMESTIC INDUSTRY. 

Look at. our history, INIr. Speaker, and say if this be not its 
lesson. Has not our commerce been stimulated to excess by 
the wars of Europe, as often as they have occurred, only to be 
involved in depression and disaster on the return of peace? 
Have not the products of our agriculture been multiplied in 
amount and in value, by the necessities of those who have been 
forced to beat their own ploughshares and pruning-hooks into 
swords and spears, at one moment, only to be left to rot in our 
granaries, or to be sacrificed in our markets, at the next ? What 
was it, too, that first called our manufactories into existence? — 
What but our own war with Great Britain and the commercial 
restrictions by which it was preceded, involving, as they did, the 
prevention, if not the prohibition, of all imports of foreign ma- 
nufactures, and not so much the protection, as the absolute 
creation of almost all our own ? And, when peace was restored, 
what but this very Tariff System, which then had its origin, and 
which it is now proposed to abolish, preserved our war-begotten 
establishments from entire destruction and overthrow ? 

These lessons, if read aright, teach us that something 
beside dollars and cents is involved in this system. We 
gained but half our independence, Sir, when we fought our- 
selves free from the political yoke of Great Britain. Nor, can 
that independence be regarded as complete, as long as we have 
not within our own limits all the means of self-defence, in the 
largest sense of that term, including not merely arms for our 
hands and ammunition for our arms, but clothing for our limbs 
as well as food for our mouths. And those means we never 
can be sure of, until American industry is placed beyond 
the reach of these controlling and over-shadowing inflaences. 
Free from these influences entirely, indeed, it never can be. 
And we should willingly submit to such portion of them as a 
wiser Power may have designed, as ties of brotherhood and 
bonds of peace among the nations. We need be in no fear, 
Sir, of counteracting that Power in this respect. It is the last 
way to preserve peace, to show ourselves unprepared for the de- 
fence of our rights or territory. That dependence which, while 
we were colonies, as we have seen, it was the policy of the 
British Parliament to promote, by forbidding " the erecting of 



PROTECTION TO DOMESTIC INDUSTRY. 213 

manufactories," it ought to be our own policy, now we are a 
nation, to prevent. And while we protest against Mr. Cambre- 
lensf's bill as destructive to the interests of our citizens, we 
ought not to forget, that it would impair the independence of 
our country. 

Mr. Speaker, the sum of the whole matter contained in these 
resolutions is this ; — that a system of encouragement and pro- 
tection to domestic manufactures was, long ago, deliberately 
adopted by the national government; that under the shadow 
— I should rather say, under the sunshine — of that system, 
vast amounts of the capital and industry of Massachusetts have 
been invested and engaged in these manufactories, and in the 
production of those supplies for which a manufacturing popula- 
tion creates a market ; and that the abandonment of this sys- 
tem will lead to the destruction of much of that capital, and to 
the diversion and depression of much of that industry. And it 
is no answer to this position, even if it were true, that the sys- 
tem was originally inexpedient and impolitic, or that it was 
founded upon false and ill-considered principles. Why, Sir, 
would it be quite consolatory to our farmers, our mechanics, 
our tradesfolk, and laboring poor, when they should be deprived 
of the means of sending their children to school, perhaps even of 
giving them comfortable food and clothing at home, by the reduc- 
tion of their prices, their wages, and their earnings and profits of 
all sorts, to show them that volume of Adam Smith, which the 
gentleman from Gloucester threatened to read to us the other 
day, and point them to the page and paragraph in which it is 
clearly demonstrated that upon every principle of political eco- 
nomy they ought to be now more prosperous and thriving than 
ever ; that it was under the existence of the Protecting System 
they ought to have felt these pinchings of poverty and of want, 
but that, by its abandonment, they ought forthwith to be re- 
stored to abundance and wealth ? Would the wise saws and 
plausible sentences of a Professor of Economics render them 
entirely satisfied with this change of condition, or work the 
more soothing miracle of convincing them that it was only 
changed for the better? Would that labored report of Mr. 
Cambreleng's, with all its facts and all its fancy, completely 



214 PROTECTION TO DOMESTIC INDUSTRY. 

reconcile them to their wretchedness, and even make them in 
love with their misery ? Or is it that little lying title of the 
bill which is looked to as the antidote of the bane beneath it ? 
The wants of the government! Sir, that significant phrase, 
properly and truly applied, has been, and would again be, a 
perfect open sesame to the purses of the people. Their last dol- 
lar and their last drop of blood would be alike at the service of 
the country, whenever they were really wanted. 

But what have the wants of the government to do with this 
matter ? Because there is more money in the treasury of the 
nation than the newly conceived constitutional scruples of a 
particular administration will permit it to spend, or even than 
its unscrupulous and corrupt extravagance will suffer it to 
squander, shall the pockets of the citizen be rifled, or the earn- 
ings of his industry be curtailed ? In order to reduce the public 
revenue some six or seven million a year, shall an annual pro- 
duction of private labor and capital, amounting, by the enor- 
mous estimate of Mr. Cambreleng himself, to three hundred 
millions, be subjected to ruin or even to risk ? Is this good 
statesmanship ? Is this sound policy ? Can no other Ways 
and Means be devised, which would answer the purpose with 
less loss and more certainty ? A surplus in the public purse, is, 
doubtless, a great evil ; but I imagine. Sir, the people, if it were 
put to them, would decide that a deficit in their own was a 
greater. The people of Massachusetts, I know, would so de- 
cide. They would respond to the deceptive argument, which is 
placed at the head of the bill, against which we are now pro- 
testing, in the language of one of their own statesmen, which, 
though WTitten more than four years ago, has a singular, and 
almost prophetic applicability to the case before us. They 
would say in the words of Mr. Adams, in his masterly report 
on manufactures in 1833, — " It is the right of the citizen, 
and not the necessities of the community, which constitutes the 
fundamental principle upon which the obligation to protect the 
interest of the manufacturer, or of any other member of society, 
is incumbent upon the nation." " It is the interest of the citi- 
zen, and not the wants of the country, which circumscribes the 
legitimate objects of protection." 



PROTECTION TO DOMESTIC INDUSTRY. 215 

Pavticulai- pains seem to have been taken, in the course of this 
debate, Mr. Speaker, to hold up an idea to the House, that our 
distinguished Senator, ]Mr. Webster, has been guilty of some 
gross inconsistency in relation to this protecting system. I have 
already alluded to one expression of this kind. But that was 
but trivial and unworthy of comment, compared with many 
other and more general strictures to the same etlect. We were 
elegantly told, for instance, the other day, that Daniel Webster, 
having expended his whole power in defending the principles of 
Free Trade in 1824, had since found himself unable to answer 
his own arguments, and had been forced to eat his own words. 
Sir, this charge is old and stale ; too old and too stale, I should 
have supposed, to have had any temptation for the origin- 
ality and ingenuity of the gentleman from whom it fell. Why, 
as long ago as the famous Debate on Mr. Foot's Resolution 
in the Senate of the United States, this same charge was made 
by Mr. Hayne, of South Carolina. It was, even then, old and 
stale, Sir. But fortunately, it was not then made behind Mr. 
Webster's back, and in that ever-memorable speech in reply to 
Mr. Hayne, which still stands unparalleled on the pages of Ame- 
rican eloquence, he indignantly and triumphantly repelled it. 

It is not, however, to be wondered at, that it should be revived 
and repeated by one who has taken occasion, in the same breath, 
to re-construct the charge of " an accursed policy," which was 
brought against the tariff by that same distinguished nullifier, in 
the hardly softer terms of " an infernal system." The charges be- 
long together, and will doubtless be appreciated together by the 
people of Massachusetts. Sir, the speeches of Mr. Webster on 
the subject of the Tariff, in 1824, and in 1828, are now bound 
up together in the same volume, and, as if to challenge, certainly 
to facilitate, the closest and most searching criticism, they have 
been placed side by side, without a single intervening page. I 
commend them to the fresh reading of the gentleman from Glou- 
cester, and, indeed, of the whole House. They will amply re- 
pay it ; richly reward it. And no candid reader, I am persuaded, 
let his opinions about politics generally, or the protecting system 
in particular, be what they may, will rise from their perusal, 
without acknowledging, at once, the utter injustice, the entire 



216 PROTECTION TO DOMESTIC INDUSTRY. 

falseness of such a charge. The course of Mr. Webster, Sir, in 
relation to the Tariff, and I might as well say, in relation to al- 
most every other question of national policy, has been the course 
of Massachusetts. Massachusetts, in common with the other 
New England States, opposed the tariff at its origin, and con- 
tinued to oppose it until after the act of 1824, — an act by which 
it was virtually declared that a protecting system was thereafter 
to be considered as the settled policy of the country. From that 
moment her opposition ceased, and her citizens generally, instead 
of persevering in unavailing efforts to destroy that system, 
resorted to the more prudent and more patriotic course of accom- 
modating themselves to it. They invested large amounts of capi- 
tal under its inducements, and their interests soon became inse- 
parably identified with its preservation. And for such preserva- 
tion, both in letter and in spirit, she has ever since voted. Such 
has been the course of Massachusetts, and such has been the 
course of her distinguished Senator, and the whole sum of their 
inconsistency is contained in the acknowledged fact, that they 
would not take part in pulling down upon their own heads, and 
upon the heads of thousands of citizens who had been compelled 
to seek its shelter, a vast and costly structure, merely because 
they had declined to approve its model, or to assist in laying its 
corner-stone. 

Mr. Speaker, the career of Mr. Webster is before the country ; 
it may be his whole career. Rumors are already rife of his 
intention to retire from public life, temporarily at least, perhaps 
forever. Let him retire when he will, he needs no defence, he 
requires no eulogy, he fears no investigation. He has not, indeed, 
squared his consistency upon the modern fashionable block. He 
has left it to others to suit their sentiments to the times, or to 
reserve all knowledge of those sentiments within their own breast. 
He has left it to others to pander to popular prejudices, to fan 
popular discontents, to stimulate the poor against the rich, to 
sacrifice principle to policy, and to follow the shadow of consist- 
ency by abandoning its substance. His course is before the 
country, and let him retire when he will — may it be still a distant, 
distant day — he will leave hght, imperishable, unfading light, 
behind him ; and that not only gilding his own memory, and 



PROTECTION" TO DOMESTIC INDUSTRY. 217 

casting glory upon the Commonwealth of his adoption, but 
cheering and guiding and illuminating the path of Constitutional 
patriotism throughout all generations. Other stars, Sir, may 
have reached a higher ascension, may have sparkled with a more 
dazzling lustre, may have shot with a wilder fire. Meteors, too, 
may have flashed, and flamed, and glared, and cost a moment's 
wonder or a moment's fear, and passed away. But as long as 
our glorious Constitution shall be borne up upon the waves of 
time, and its banner of Union and Liberty be seen streaming 
to the winds, in every moment of doubt, in every hour of dan- 
ger, the passengers and the pilot will be found turning alike fo 
their direction to our own Northern Star — always clear? 
always above the horizon — 



" Of whose true-fixed p.nd resting quality, 
There is no fellow in the firmament." 



In conclusion, Mr. Speaker, let me express the hope that the 
resolutions on your table may not only pass, and pass in their 
present shape, but pass, too, with the general and cordial assent 
of the House. Sir, if from any spot on the wide surface of this 
Union a sound of undivided, unbroken, unanimous remon- 
strance ought to go up to the National Councils against the 
measure to which these resolutions relate, it is from this very 
spot. If, upon any occasion, the voices of all political parties, 
and of all personal and public interests throughout this Common- 
wealth, ought to lose their conflicting tones, and leave their 
jarring discords, and mingle in one deep diapason of depreca- 
tion and protest, it is upon this very occasion. Here, in the hall 
of the Representatives of Massachusetts, assembled to watch 
over the interests and to provide for the welfare of the whole 
people, — here, when those interests and that welfare are menaced 
with destruction, a voice, as it were of one man in unity, as it 
were of that whole people in volume, ought to be uttered ; — and 
here, it would seem to me, if those Representatives are true to 
their trusts and faithful to their constituents, such a voice ought 
to be uttered now. And notwithstanding some symptoms of 
opposition in other stages of this business, and notwithstanding 

19 



218 PROTECTION TO DOMESTIC INDUSTRY. 

that in this last stage, also, one gentleman, at least, who is not 
accustomed to act alone, or to cry " follow " to no effect, has 
argued with all his energy and all his ardor against the resolu- 
tions, I can hardly help believing that such a voice, substan- 
tially, will now be heard. I cannot bring myself to believe. Sir, 
that any considerable division of opinion exists or will be ex- 
pressed upon this subject. Gentlemen may have differed as to 
the expediency of introducing it here, may have been desirous, 
some of them, to prevent its introduction, and may still regret 
the necessity, in which it involves them, of choosing between 
allegiance to their party leaders elsewhere, and fidelity to their 
constituents here. But now that the question is brought fairly 
before them, now that they are compelled to give their yea or 
nay to the propositions which these resolutions contain, I can- 
not believe that they will hesitate long which to choose, or falter 
in the expression of their choice. 

I hope and trust, Sir, that we are to see no party lines drawn 
in the decision of this question. I hope and trust that neither 
the wool growers of Berkshire, nor the manufacturers of Mid- 
dlesex, all or any of them, are to have their opinions belied and 
their interests betrayed, out of mere party feeling. I hope and 
trust that the great manufacturing Capital of New England, 
which at the touch of the protecting system has risen up almost 
in an instant to her present station of prosperity and pride, — 
should she be doomed in some future day to take up her la- 
mentation and say, " how doth the city sit solitary, that was full 
of people," — will be spared the pain of going on with the 
words of the Prophet and adding, " all her friends have dealt 
treacherously with her, they are become her enemies." One 
gentleman from Lowell, (Mr. Mansur,) indeed, has frankly 
avowed his purpose of voting for the resolutions ; let us hope 
that he will not stand alone. Gentlemen may have agreed 
with the gentleman from Gloucester, that we ought not to 
compromise the dignity of the State by interfering with Con- 
gress upon trivial occasions, and thrusting our impertinent peti- 
tions in its face to no purpose, that we should reserve our 
applications for cases of the last importance, — the passage of a 
resolution, for instance Mr. Speaker, to falsify and mutilate the 



PROTECTION TO DOMESTIC INDUSTRY. 219 

Constitutional Records of Congress, in order to appease the 
wrath and conciliate the countenance of censured sovereignty — 
and that we ought not to waste them upon such paltry matters 
as the prosperiti/ and property of the ivhole people ; — but now, 
Sir, tiiat this remonstrance is destined to reach Congress, as no 
one can doubt it is, I cannot believe that they will deny their 
assent to its principles, or their vote to its passage. 



CONGRATULATIONS TO THE WHIGS OF NEW YORK. 

A SPEECH DELIVERED AT MASOXIC HALL, NEW YORK, NOVEMBER 22, 1837. 



Mr. Mayor and Gentlemen, — 

I STAND before you as the organ of a delegation from the 
Whigs of Boston, to offer you their congratulations on the event 
which has given occasion to this festival. I might well wish, 
with the gentleman from Rhode Island, who has just taken his 
seat — and much better wish it than he now could, since he has 
already performed his own part so honorably — that this duty 
had fallen upon stronger shoulders. Pressed into the service, as 
I was, at short notice, and with no opportunity for preparation 
at home, and tossed upon the Sound, as I have been until within 
an hour past, ever since I left home, with no source of inspi- 
ration at hand but the fog through which we were groping, I 
feel myself no fit representative either of those who have sent 
me here, or of those by whom I am accompanied. Much less 
do I feel competent to answer the expectations, or to do justice 
to the deserts, of those whom I address. But I have at least 
this consolation. Sir, — that, a thousand times better qualified 
for the position which I have the honor to hold, as are many of 
those whom we have left behind us, and many too, let me add, 
of those whom we have brought with us, no one, no one of them 
all, whether present or absent, could do entire and perfect justice 
to this occasion. Human language is adapted to the descrip- 
tion of ordinary events, and to the expression of ordinary 
emotions. But its strongest terms seem weak, and its choicest 
phrases sound common, and its warmest figures fall cold and 
frozen from our fips, when we are called upon to deal with an 



CONGRATULATIONS TO THE WHIGS OP NEW YORK. 221 

event of such startling character, of such momentous conse- 
quence, as that which you are assembled to celebrate. And that 
tongue has never found a place in mortal mouth, that voice has 
never vibrated on earthly air, that language has never been re- 
duced within the compass of human sounds or human signs, 
which can express, with any approach to justice, the triumphant 
thrill of joy which that event produced in the bosom of every 
Boston Whig. In the name of every Boston Whig, then, I 
congratulate you on its occurrence, and from the bottom of all 
their hearts, I thank you for the exertions by which it was 
brought about. 

What is that event, Sir ? Is it the election of a handful of 
Whig Senators or a hundred of Whig Representatives to the 
Legislature of New York? What possible interest could the 
Whigs of Boston have in such a result ? The jurisdiction of 
those magistrates could never extend, either for good or for evil, 
one inch beyond the boundaries of your own Commonwealth ; — 
no, Sir, not even were they to stretch and strain their prerogative 
to the full dimensions and stature of the most approved demo- 
cratic standards. Is it the mere success of a few thousand po- 
litical friends, and the consequent defeat of a few thousand poli- 
tical foes ? Why, Sir, such things have happened before since 
the world was made, and, thank Heaven, they have been getting 
to be pretty frequent within the last few months. But though 
the Whigs of Boston have always been rejoiced to hear of them, 
they have never regarded it as altogether indispensable, or, in- 
deed, as anywise important, to despatch an embassy hundreds of 
miles over sea and land to say so. Is it the downright rejection 
and reprobation by a great majority of that very people who, 
above all others, were relied on for its approbation and adoption, 
of a financial policy which has already brought embarrassment 
and bankruptcy upon half the country, and which seemed des- 
tined in its further progress and final consummation to crush every 
energy and cripple every industry it had hitherto spared ? Not 
even this definition. Sir, just and true as it is as far as it goes, 
conveys any adequate idea of the event, which, in the eyes of 
the Whigs of Boston, you are now engaged in celebrating. 
Embarrassment and bankruptcy, indeed, we have all seen and 
19* 



222 CONGRATULATIONS TO THE WHIGS OF NEW YORK. 

suffered enough of. The people for whom I speak, have not 
merely sympathized with them elsewhere ; they have shared them 
at home. And their share, you well know, Sir, has been neither 
light nor inconsiderable. But had it been ten times greater than 
it was, had it pleased Heaven to steep them in poverty to the 
very lips, so it had really been the work of Heaven, so it had 
resulted from their own rashness or mismanagement, so no 
wilful and wanton act of authority in other men had produced 
it, so any advantage, so even no detriment, were thereby accru- 
ing to the Republic and its liberties, they would have borne it 
all, and more than all, patiently and cheerfully. Massachusetts 
Whigs have learned of their Pilgrim Fathers to murmur at no 
dispensation of an overruling Providence. And they have 
learned, too, of their Patriot Fathers, neither to gainsay nor to 
grudge any amount of costs and charges which the maintenance 
of their rights and liberties may require ; and that, Sir, whether 
payment be demanded in gold and silver, or whether it may only 
be rendered in the harder coinage of their hearts, or in the purer 
currency of their blood. 

It is then, Mr. Mayor and Gentlemen, in no spirit of mere party 
triumph ; it is with no feeling of mere pecuniary relief; it is not to 
make merry with victorious friends; it is not — certainly, certainly, 
it is not — to exult over vanquished enemies; nor is it only to 
testify our exceeding joy that the rash and ruinous policy of the 
national administration has received a blow from which it can 
never rise, and never in any degree recover, that we have come 
all the way from Faneuil Hall to offer you our hands, and to 
open to you our hearts on this occasion. The Whigs of Boston 
have felt that something more than all this has been accom- 
plished ; that something more worthy of the illuminations and 
bonfires and bell-ringings, and all the signs and modes and shows 
of a people's joy, to which this whole day and this whole City 
is devoted, has been achieved. We have come. Sir, to congra- 
tulate you on a Constitution restored to supremacy, on the inte- 
rests of a whole people redeemed from oppression, on the rights 
of a whole people rescued from overthrow, on this great and 
glorious Republic, with all its appurtenances and all its attri- 
butes, checked, arrested, stopped — I do not say on the brink. 



CONGRATULATIONS TO THE WHIGS OF NEW YORK. 223 

but — midway down the steep of a fatal chasm, and raised up 
and replaced in safety on that old straightforward, constitu- 
tional, track of Liberty and Law, for which alone it was first 
constructed, and along which it has run with unmatched speed 
for more than forty years I 

Such, Sir, it has seemed to us, is the event you this day cele- 
brate. Such and so great — if New York be but true to herself 
hereafter, and who shall dare to suggest that she will ever again 
be false ? — such and so great will be the results of her late 
unexampled achievement. 

Sir, this is neither the time nor the place for an argument. 
But no argument can be needed to sustain any thing that is 
expressed or any thing that is implied in the view we have 
taken of your victory. We all know that not only the prosper- 
ity, but the liberty of this country has, for eight years past, been 
overshadowed by an arbitrary and despotic power, and the rights 
of the people trampled in the dust by the iron heel of a usurp- 
ing military favorite. We have all heard the will of one man 
proclaimed absolute throughout the land. We have all seen 
that single will guiding, governing, controlhng, every thing, — 
vetoing laws proposed, nullifying laws passed, dictating the pro- 
ceedings of one branch of the legislature, expunging the records 
of the other, overleaping treaty obhgations, denying the validity 
of judicial decisions, defying the very precepts of the Constitu- 
tion, crushing old institutions, creating new institutions, remov- 
ing everybody that could in any way be removed, appointing 
everybody that was in any way to be appointed, yes. Sir, up 
even to the successor to that exalted station, which, fortunately 
for the nation, it could itself no longer hold, as the vantage- 
ground of its own unsatiated dominion. 

And that successor — what have we seen or known of him? 
I will not speak of him as a man. I will say nothing of his 
political character or personal qualities. I leave all these consi- 
derations to New York justice — to the justice of those who 
have seen him most, and who know him best — to that justice of 
which the venerable gentleman from Dutchess County has already 
given us a fair sample, if not a full measure. But what has he 
done as President of this Republic ? What has he promised, pro- 



224 COXGRATULATIONS TO THE WHIGS OF NEW YORK. 

posed, or performed, as the chosen chief magistrate of this great 
people? Coming into power, and called upon to declare his 
purposes, at a moment when that whole RepubUc was wrapped 
in thick, wide-spread, midnight gloom, and that whole people 
bowed down beneath a weight of affliction almost unprecedented 
in the history of the commercial world, what light did he throw 
in upon that darkness? what consolation did he offer to that 
aflliction ? Light ! Sir, it was the light of another night, new- 
fallen upon midnight. Consolation ! Sir, it was the consolation 
of that angel-voice in Revelation, which, after four trumpets of 
wrath had already sounded, after the third part of the trees 
were scathed and withered, and all the green grass was burnt 
up, after the third part of the sea had become blood, and the 
third part of the ships were destroyed, after the third part of the 
glorious sun and stars were smitten and had ceased to shine, 
was heard crying in Heaven, — " Woe, woe, woe, to the inhabit- 
ers of the earth, by reason of the other voices of the trumpets 
which are yet to sound!" 

Happily, Sir, this voice was not uttered, in the present case, 
under any sanction of Divine right. Happily, the inhabiters 
of the earth to whom it related, were not, in this instance, 
the doomed subjects of a supreme, original, unquestionable 
authority. The power from which it proceeded was a mere 
human power — an entirely derivative power — an easily con- 
trollable power. And more than all, it was a power derived 
from that very people, and responsible to that very people, upon 
whom all these past woes had fallen, and all these future woes 
were about to fall. If that people would, they could hear the 
voice. If they would, they could interpret its tones. If they 
would, they could avert its dreadful denunciations, and put it 
to shame and to silence forever. And, Sir, it is the very event 
upon which we have been sent to congi-atulate you this day, 
that the people of this great State of New York have heard it, 
have understood it, and have, as far as on them depends, con- 
demned it to shame and to silence for the future. 

Mr. Mayor, the triumph of this day, neither in itself nor in its 
influences, relates to your own State only. No, Sir, I see the 
whole people of this country rising up to claim a share in it. 



CONGRATULATIONS TO THE WHIGS OP NEW YORK. 225 

The State of New York, by its wide-spread territory and thick- 
settled population, by the inexhaustible resources of its soil, by 
the indomitable, and, I had almost said, illimitable, enterprise of 
its seaboard, and by all the countless attributes of wealth and 
pride and power with which it is crowded, exerts an influence 
over the concerns of this Republic, to which not even its great 
number of actual votes in the national councils furnishes any 
adequate index. But this is not all. It has been reserved to 
this great State to give that last finishing stroke to a series of 
strokes, that last crowning victory to a series of victories, with- 
out which all the rest would have been wellnigh wasted, but 
with which the cause of the Constitution and of the people is 
secure ! 

And there is still another view, Sir, in which the whole coun- 
try may be said to claim a share in this triumphal jubilee. 
Many of the States of this Union, almost all of those which are 
represented here to-day, and many of those which are not repre- 
sented, have already asserted that claim for themselves at the 
polls. . Maine has done it; Rhode Island has done it; Vermont 
has done it ; Massachusetts, I need not say, has done it. It has 
been asserted by Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Ohio ; by 
New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, and, I had almost added, 
Michigan; but I have this instant learned that Michigan has 
at length been ascertained to have given a majority of nearly 
four hundred votes in favor of our adversaries, — 

" Oh, mighty Crcsar ! dost thou lie so low, 
Are all thy conquests, triumphs, glories, spoils, 
Shrunk to this little measure ! " 

But, Sir, with this single exception, if, indeed, an exception it 
can be called, all the States which I have named have asserted 
by their own noble acts, an indisputable claim to a share in the 
triumphs of this day. But why should we stop there. Sir ? Who 
shall fix the limits of that great tide of regeneration which is 
now washing over the land? Who shall say unto it, — thus far 
shalt thou go and no further? Who shall declare that here its 
proud waves shall be stayed ? For one, Mr. Mayor, I am con- 
tent with no enumeration of the States which are at this 



226 CONGRATULATIONS TO THE WHIGS OF NEW YORK. 

moment, by great majorities of the people, in favor of Whig 
principles and a Whig policy, which does not embrace the whole 
six-and-twenty of our beloved Union. New York and Massa- 
chusetts have had an opportunity to show and make clearly 
manifest what they are in favor of, and so have all the other 
States to which I have referred. But let us be slow to shut out 
from this glorious company of patriot States, those to whom no 
such opportunity has yet been afforded. Their time and their 
turn will yet come, and that shortly ; and let us have no fear for 
the results. Depend upon it, Sir, the people, the whole people, 
are coming; — I should rather say. they have come; — come to 
their own senses ; come to their own salvation ; come to the 
pulling down of the strongholds of corruption ; come to the 
restoration of fallen liberty ; come to the reestablishment, in all 
their beauty and in all their strength, of the old constitutional 
bulwarks of this Republic ! 

But I must not trespass longer on your time. Once more, in 
behalf of the Whigs of Boston, I congratulate you on your 
success ; once more, I thank you for your exertions. And not 
in their behalf only. In behalf of the whole great body of Mas- 
sachusetts Whigs — I know all their hearts, and am not afraid to 
speak for them all — in behalf of them all, of every occupation 
and profession; in behalf of Whig mechanics, who have taken 
the measure of true patriotism from the rule of a Paul Revere ; 
in behalf of Whig farmers, who have ploughed the straight fur- 
row of a Prescott and a Hawley ; in behalf of Whig merchants, 
who have learned to sum up the great account of public duty 
from the ledger of a John Hancock ; — in behalf of them all, of 
every county, town, and district of the State, whether scattered 
over the plains of Lexington and Concord, or clustered at the 
foot of Bunker Hill, or crowded within the precincts of Faneuil 
Hall ; — wherever they are, from the furthest reach of either Cape 
to the line where their territory embraces and becomes one with 
your own ; — in behalf of every one of them — all and every- 
where true, all and everywhere triumphant — I congratulate you, 
I thank you, and in the name of them all, I offer you the right 
hand of a hearty, genuine, Whig fellowship. 



THE SUB-TREASURY SYSTEM. 

A SPEECH DELIVERED IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES OF MASSACHU- 
SETTS, IN COMMITTEE OF THE WHOLE, MARCH 26, 1838. 



It is not without a good deal of distrust, Mr. Chairman, that I 
find myself on the floor of the House. During the early part of 
the session, I will confess, I more than once desired to be there. 
More than once did I find the opening line of the old Roman Sa- 
tirist rising to my lips — semper ego audilor tanlum ? nunquam- 
ne reponam ? — must I always be a mere hearer ? shall I never 
have a chance to reply ? And sometimes I was almost disposed 
to quarrel with the unmerited honor which had seemingly 
doomed me to a perpetual silence. But these feelings have now 
been so long restrained, that I fear something beside the dispo- 
sition to mingle in debate may have passed away. Certainly, 
Sir, it would have been any thing but a matter of regret to me 
if the yeas and nays had been called on these resolutions a 
week or more ago, when they first came up in the orders of the 
day. Discussed as the Sub-Treasury system had been, almost 
without intermission for six months past, in Congress, in caucus, 
in the newspapers, and at the fireside, I should have been quite 
content, for one, to have let it pass here, at so late an hour of 
the session, entirely without debate. 

It was suggested by the gentleman from Gloucester, (Mr. 
Rantoul,) in opposition to such a course, that the House was 
utterly ignorant of the merits of the measure — that not thirty 
of them knew what the Sub-Treasury system was. I am in- 
clined to believe, Mr. Chairman, that a large majority of the 



228 THE SUB-TREASURY SYSTEM. 

members pretty well understood and appreciated that system. 
I have no idea that any considerable number of them were then, 
or are now, desirous of a nearer or more familiar acquaintance 
with it. At any rate, I believe that the minds of the whole 
House are made up upon it. I believe the minds of the whole 
people are made up upon it. I have no hope, certainly, of 
changing a single shade of public or private sentiment by any 
thing I can say in favor of these resolutions ; and I will add 
that I have no particular apprehension that any thing that has 
been said, or that may be said, against them, will work any 
very material change in that public or that private sentiment. 
I heartily vi^ish, therefore, that we had come to the vote a week 
ago, and had speeded the resolutions on their errand to the 
Capitol, to do whatever of good or evil they may be designed or 
destined to effect. 

But it has been ordered otherwise. The opponents of the 
resolutions demanded, claimed, insisted on, a discussion. And 
in conformity with their convenience and agreeably to their sug- 
gestion, if not directly upon their motion, a time for that discus- 
sion was assigned. Four days have now nearly elapsed since 
that time arrived, and we all know how they have been occu- 
pied. The first was taken up by the gentleman from Glouces- 
ter, in proposing and pressing sundry amendments to the resolu- 
tions, all of which were rejected by large majorities. The first 
hour or more of the second day was employed by the gentle- 
man from Marblehead, (Mr. Robinson,) in an effective speech 
against the resolutions; and the gentleman from Gloucester, 
rising again as his friend from Marblehead took his seat, has 
held the floor from that time to this. I cannot help hoping, Mr. 
Chairman, under all these circumstances, that the whole waste 
of public time and public money which this protracted contro- 
versy will have cost, is not destined to be charged to the ac- 
count of the majority in this House. If it be, however, there 
will only be another warning added to a list of warnings 
already neither short nor unedifying, against the manifestation 
of an excessive courtesy and the accordance of too many indul- 
gences to political opponents. 

The gentleman from Gloucester, in his remarks on Thursday, 



THE SUB-TREASURY SYSTEM. 229 

took occasion to allude to Mr. Webster. He observed, if I re- 
member right, that he had made a particular study of his poli- 
tical character, and should be glad of an opportunity to show 
up its consistency to the House. This was not a new topic, 
Sir, with the gentleman from Gloucester. I had the plea- 
sure of meeting him upon it last winter. But though he has 
repeated his remarks, I do not intend to repeat mine. The 
political charactet of Mr. Webster needs no defence. It is safe 
in the custody, not of his own Massachusetts constituents 
merely, but of the whole American people, whose faithful sol- 
dier and servant he has so long been. It is safe, I might better 
say, in its own invincible greatness, in its own invulnerable 
strength. But there is one part of that character, which, how- 
ever the gentleman from Gloucester may have studied, he cer- 
tainly has not yet learned. I mean that magnanimity of which 
an interesting anecdote has recently been related in the papers 
of the day. 

It appears that during the late great speech of Mr. Webster, 
in the Senate of the United States, on the very subject we are 
now considering, just as he was about to bear down on Mr. Bu- 
chanan of Pennsylvania, it was suggested to him that that gen- 
tleman's hands were tied by certain instructions which he had 
received from his State Legislature ; and what was our Sena- 
tor's reply ? "I will not say another word about him — I will 
not even look in that direction." — The gentleman from Glouces- 
ter, on the contrary, having been goaded and stung to the quick 
by the unpalatable truths which had been told, in a previous 
debate, of the administration which he supports, and having 
considered it inexpedient to reply during that debate, and hav- 
ing nursed his wrath to keep it warm until these Sub-Treasury 
resolutions should come up for discussion, had no sooner gained 
audience upon them, than he vented the whole amount and 
accumulation of his ire, the whole principal and interest of his 
indignation — upon whom, Sir ? Upon any one w^ho had as- 
saulted, or insulted, or in any way injured him ? Upon any 
one even, who was in a position to defend himself when at- 
tacked ? No, Sir, no, but partly on the distinguished Senator 
to whom I have already alluded — five hundred miles distant 

20 



230 THE SUB-TREASURY SYSTEM. 

from him in person, and infinitely farther removed in character 
from the utmost reach of any shafts which he could throw — 
and partly upon one who, though personally present, and com- 
pelled to submit to whatever words or looks it might please the 
gentleman to throw at him, was entirely prevented, by his offi- 
cial position, from resisting, resenting, or in any way noticing 
them. 

Sir, I will confess that on the occasion to which I allude, I 
felt in no small degree complimented at being coupled with the 
great Massachusetts statesman in the censure of the gentleman 
from Gloucester. But this was by no means the only occasion 
on which I have been subjected to his attacks, and heretofore I 
have had no such good company to console me, while my hands 
have been equally tied behind me. The gentleman best knows 
his own motives and purposes, but it cannot have escaped ob- 
servation, that from the beginning of the session to this hour, 
he has omitted no opportunity which has occurred, or which 
could be created, to cast censure and contumely upon the Chair. 
For the first time. Sir, I am now in a condition to retort. But let 
me assure the House that I do not intend to avail myself of my 
position for any such purpose. .Certainly, Sir, I have not risen 
with any such intent, and I hope to sit down without having 
been betrayed into any such act. Placed by the indulgence of 
the House in a station where it is my duty to check personality 
and enforce decorum in others, I will not voluntarily exhibit a 
violation of order in my own person. I will not be provoked 
into a personal altercation with the gentleman from Gloucester. 
He has brandished his lance, and shaken his red flag, and played 
the Matadore in vain. His taunts and provocations I give to 
the wind. To his arguments, if he has uttered any, and I 
should chance to meet them along my track, I will pay the 
respect of a passing notice. And now, Sir, to the subject. 

It is one, I need hardly say, of no small compass or compre- 
hension. It calls upon us to look both before and after. The 
measure to which these resolutions relate, is at once a goal and 
a starting point in national affairs. It is the end of one series 
of experiments, and it is the beginning of another. And in 
order to understand its real nature, we ought to look to what 



THE SUB-TREASURY SYSTEM. 231 

is past, as well as to what is to come. We ouglit to see 
clearly of what it is the consummation, and of what it is the 
commencement. 

V When our honored fellow-citizen, Mr. John Quincy Adams, 
was supplanted in the Presidential chair, some nine years ago, 
by General Jackson, the currency of the United States was not 
surpassed in convenience, uniformity, or soundness, by that of 
any other country on the face of the globe. It enjoyed un- 
bounded confidence. It afforded universal satisfaction. From 
no quarter of the Union, from neither political party, was there 
a breath breathed against it. The party by whom the change 
of administration was effected, had not been slow in hunting 
up all manner of imaginary grievances which they might pro- 
mise and pledge themselves to hunt down. They complained 
of the extravagance of Mr. Adams, and they have shown the 
justice of that complaint by doubling, and in some years trebling, 
the annual amount of the national expenses. They complained 
of political corruption, and they have since given us plainly to 
perceive what they understood by political purity. They pledged 
themselves to " a thorough and searching reform," and the thou- 
sands of political adversaries who have been punished, and the 
tens of thousands of political friends who have been rewarded, 
through the medium of the appointing power, have clearly 
manifested what that thorough and searching reform was in- 
tended to be. But of the currency of the country they made 
no complaint. For that they promised nothing. And most 
fortunate would it have been, if with regard to it they had per- 
formed nothing. 

But not such was their wisdom. Not such our fate. For the 
first year or two, however, every thing went on well and quietly 
in this respect. Indeed, it will be found that in more than one of 
their early Executive messages, not a few phrases of compli- 
ment and eulogy were rounded on the goodness of the circulat- 
ing medium, and on the services of its great regulator, the Bank 
of the United States. Particular praise was bestowed on the 
Bank for its disinterested efforts in enabling the Government to 
complete the payment of the national debt. But in a moment, 
and without a note of warning, a change came over the spirit of 



2o:i THE SUB-TREASUKY SYSTEM. 

the administration. The currency, but yesterday deemed sound 
and heahhful, was to-day discovered to be diseased and rotten. 
The Bank, but yesterday commended and eulogized, was to-day 
pronounced unconstitutional, corrupt, dangerous to liberty. In 
wilful disregard of the existing and long-established rates of do- 
mestic exchanges, it was declared to have failed in affording 
a uniform currency, and with a hardihood of assertion which 
excited derision throughout the country, was proclaimed an 
unsafe depository of the public moneys. 

AVhether this extraordinary transition from praise to scandal, 
from admiration to aversion, from commendation to condemna- 
tion, was the result of that sordid repulse which the administra- 
tion had sustained in certain notorious proposals to the branch 
bank in New Hampshire, those who know any thing of the his- 
tory of political coquetry and caprice can judge as well as I. 
But the facts we all know. The institution was doomed to be 
at once discarded from further employment. The renewal of 
its charter was vetoed. The public treasure was removed from 
its vaults. And war to the knife was declared against it, and 
all concerned with it. Its officers were denounced. Its Presi- 
dent was served up in the government journals under every 
odious nickname and epithet ; — all his acts set in the Executive 
note-book, learned and conned by rote, and the greater part of 
every Executive message devoted to their recital to the people. 
To use the language of Mr. Senator King of Georgia, who, be 
it remembered, only parted company with the administration at 
the late extra session of Congress, "if Mr. Biddle expanded, he 
was bribing the country ; if he contracted he was ruining the 
country ; if he imported specie, he was speculating on the 
country ; if he exported specie, he was conspiring against the 
country ; if he stood up, he was impudent ; if he sat down, he 
was suspicious ; if he lay down, he was useless ; and whenever 
he made a move, whether he crossed above or below the Execu- 
tive, he equally mudded the waters." But enough of Mr. Bid- 
die. The removal of the deposits was of course succeeded by 
their distribution among the selected State banks. With this 
distribution went letters from the Secretary of the Treasury, en- 
joining upon the new recipients to loan their deposits liberally 



THE SUB-TREASURY SYSTEM. 233 

among the people. And this injunction was more than fulfilled. 
Then followed the importation of gold to the amount of thirty 
or forty millions of dollars, partly on account of foreign claims, 
and partly as a matter of outright purchase and trade by the 
Executive or his agents. Then came the clumsy, if not wilfully 
harassing, execution of the surplus distribution act, to which the 
President had given at length a " reluctant assent." And last 
of all, to close this strange, eventful history, was issued that 
well-known Treasury order, by which all payments for public 
lands were to be made in gold and silver. 

These, Mr. Chairman, are the Executive measures which have 
been the heralds and harbingers of the Sub-Treasury system. 
This is that series of experiments by which its approach has 
been announced, and its way prepared before it. But there 
have been other simultaneous events in the affairs of the coun- 
try. There have been mercantile distresses and pecuniary press- 
ures, thickly crowded along the whole period in which these 
measures have been executed. There has been a total derange- 
ment of the currency and exchanges, a perfect prostration of 
credit, and, to describe all in one phrase, a general suspension of 
payments throughout the country. And there is no more im- 
portant inquiry in the discussion in which we are engaged, than 
whether these events also are to be comprised in the catalogue 
of Executive acts, or, in other words, whether the national ad- 
ministration is directly or indirectly responsible for their occur- 
rence. 

Some of the gentlemen. Sir, with whom I am accustomed to 
act here and elsewhere, have, in a previous debate, exceedingly 
qualified their reference of these events to Executive action. 
From any and all such qualification I desire to dissent. For 
one, I desire to be understood, now and at all times, to charge 
the whole of the late crisis — all about it that has been pecu- 
liarly aggravated and overwhelming, all about it that has dis- 
tinguished it from the thousand and one temporary calamities 
which have chequered the history of commerce in all ages and 
countries, all about it that has made it the crisis that it has been 
and still is, — to these measures of the national administration. 
Contractions and expansions, extensions and revulsions, are, I 

20* 



234 THE SUE-TREASURY SYSTEM. 

know, to some extent, the necessary and inevitable incidents to 
commercial 'operations. They are doubtless more frequent and 
more formidable where the circulating medium of commerce is 
paper than where it is metallic, or, in other words, where that 
medium is generally abundant than where it is generally scarce, 
or, in still other phraseology, where commerce has a wide 
range, than where it has a narrow one. Bat whatever its range 
and whatever its medium, they belong to commerce, as naturally 
and as necessarily as the tides belong to the ocean, which is the 
great highway of commerce. And sometimes they are produced 
by causes with which the nature or the amount of the circulating 
medium have no connection. Whether their departure and re- 
turn can be calculated and predicted with all the accuracy of a 
comet's tail, as has been maintained by the gendeman from 
Gloucester, I will not undertake to assert. I am willing, how- 
ever, to admit, if anybody desires the admission, that one of 
these ordinary contractions or revulsions was to have been ex- 
pected, and might have occurred, at or about the time at which 
this great crisis was developed, even if General Jackson had 
never been elevated to the Presidency. 

But notwithstanding this admission, and in entire consist- 
ency with all that it implies, I assert again my unwavering 
and unalterable conviction that but for his Presidency, and 
but for his policy in relation to the currency, this crisis could 
never have occurred. All that has lifted it above the level of 
common commercial reactions, all that has constituted it an 
era in the history of the country and of its commerce — an 
era, I might as well say, in the history of all countries and of 
all commerce, — is in my judgment to be ascribed solely and 
unqualifiedly to the national administration. And as to 
the final and fatal catastrophe of the crisis, the suspension of 
specie payments, I hold the government of the United States, 
in 1837, as morally responsible for its occurrence, as the govern- 
ment of Great Britain was, just forty years before, when the 
same event was brought about in England under the express 
authority of Orders in Council. Yes, Sir, Orders in Council 
did the deed in this case as in that ; those Treasury orders 
which, while they produced all the disasters of their prototypes 



THE SUB-TREASURY SYSTEM. 205 

in 1797, were hardly less arbitrary, hardly less tyrannical, than 
those later Orders in Council against which General Jackson 
himself so nobly contended, and over which he so gloriously tri- 
umphed at the battle of New Orleans. 

Gentlemen who differ from me in this position will adduce 
many other and, as they hold, independent causes of these 
events. They will tell you of the multiplication of banks. 
And I agree with them that this has been one of the causes 
of the crisis. But what induced and stimulated and made 
way for the multiplication of banks? They will tell you of 
the excessive issues of banks. And again I agree with them 
that this has been one of the causes of the crisis. But what 
caused these excessive issues of thet)anks ? They will tell you 
of overtrading and overaction in all departments of business, of 
speculations in Western lands, and of gambling and swindling 
in all sorts of worthless stocks. And still again I agree with 
them that these were among the causes of the crisis. But still 
I ask, what caused this overtrading and overaction, this specu- 
lation and gambling and swindling ? Why this stopping short 
at second causes ? Are these excessive creations and issues of 
banks, these extravagant operations of trade and business, these 
wild and wicked speculations in stocks and stones, the natural 
and necessary results of any thing in our national condition, 
moral, social, or political ? If so, why has their manifestation 
been reserved for this precise period of our history ? Why have 
they never been exhibited before, or never but once before, and 
that but partially and in connection with a portion of the same 
extraordinary and unusual circumstances. By what bad fortune 
of General Jackson's was it — a man, by the way, who seems to 
me never to have met with any thing but the best of fortune, 
who, by a kind of joke of fortune,* was raised to a pinnacle of 
power which might not have so dizzied him, had he ever dreamed 
of it in advance, — by what bad fortune of his was it, I repeat, 
that this commercial outbreak, this financial freshet, if I may so 
speak, was reserved to signalize his accession to authority ? And 

■Cum sint 



Quales ex luimili magna ad fastigia rerum 
Extollit, quoties voluit fortuna jocari. 



236 THE SUB-TREASURY SYSTEM. 

if these excesses and extravagances have not been the natural 
results of our national constitution or condition, what has pro- 
duced them ? What raging dog-star, what influence of Dragon's 
tail or Ursa Major, what spherical predominance or heavenly 
compulsion, what thrusting on of deity or of devil, has effected 
these marvellous aberrations from our ordinary principles and 
practices ? How has it happened, Sir, that one half the people 
of the country have been mad, like Hamlet, just north-north-west, 
and sane enough towards every other point of the compass ? 

It cannot, Mr. Chairman, be necessary to resort to any such 
absurd and extravagant hypotheses to explain the first outset and 
impulse of the crisis that has occurred. I know that the opera- 
tions of commerce are intritate and complex. I know that the 
influences which ordinarily affect credit are subtle and puzzling 
to the sense. And as I have listened, day after day, to the count- 
less contradictory views which have been presented here on the 
subject of banks, credit, and currency, I have been disposed to 
apply to them what an old poet wrote so well of honor, and to 
say,— 

Credit is like the glassy bubble 
Which gives philosophers so much trouble, 
Whose least part cracked, the whole does fly, 
And wits are cracked to find out why. 

But while this is true of the ordinary operations of trade and 
the ordinary influences upon credit, it has no application be- 
yond them. No puzzling of the brains, or cracking of the wits 
is necessary to discover the causes of great and extraordinary 
crises. They are not brought about by intricate operations or 
subtle influences. Power, power, divine or human, miraculous 
or malicious, can alone produce them ; and when produced, they 
are their own interpreters, and rarely fail to point at once and 
plainly to their author. And this crisis which we are considering, 
seems to me, above all others that I have ever heard or read of, 
in its whole inception, progress, and close, to point so plainly, so 
clearly, so directly to the national administration — its second 
causes, in which we are all agreed, seem so closely and insepa- 
rably connected with the executive measures to which I have 
referred — as to leave no room for doubting by what or by whom 



THE SUB-TREASURY SYSTEM. 237 

it has been produced. Sir, I intend to cast no imputation upon 
any member or class of members in this House. I know that 
honest men differ upon this subject. But I cannot help saying 
that having divested myself repeatedly, as far as I was able, of 
every party bias and political prejudice, and having examined 
this question again and again with all the candor and all the 
care I could bring to it, I never have been able to conceive how 
any honest mind could exculpate the Government from a main 
and primary agency in the production of this crisis. 

I will not weary the House by going deeply into the argument 
by which this conclusion has been reached. It has been pre- 
sented to the country frequently of late, and with far greater 
force than I could bring to it. But there are two very simple views 
of the subject, to which I cannot forbear to ask a moment's 
attention. They seem to me to be conclusive to this extent, if 
no further, — they change the burden of proof, and throw upon 
the Government the responsibility of showing their own inno- 
cence ; a work in which, I need hardly say, they have thus far 
signally failed. 

The first of these views is derived from the well-known histo- 
rical fact, that there was the same multiplication of banks, the 
same extension of bank credits, the same speculation and over- 
trading, and the same suspension of specie payments — the same 
I mean in kind, though falling far short in degree and extent — 
when the Bank of the United States was broken up in 1811, and 
when the government resorted to temporary expedients, as now, 
to conduct the finances of the country. Now if there be any 
truth in the old axiom, that like causes produce like results, I 
pray gentlemen to tell us what like causes existed and operated 
in these only periods of our national history in which these like 
results have been exhibited, except the government measures to 
which I have alluded. 

1/ The second of these views is not less simple, nor is either of 
them less satisfactory for being simple. It is this. When Gene- 
ral Jackson was inaugurated, the currency was sound and good. 
He undertook to make it better. He laid his hands upon it for 
that purpose, and in the midst of his experiments, the explosion 
took place. The currency is prostrated, and public credit lies 



238 THE SUB-TREASURY SYSTEM. 

dead at his feet. And now who shall say that this was not his 
work, and the result of his operations ? If ever there was a case 
of a criminal caught in the act, such seems to me to be the case 
of the government. Were an individual culprit brought to the 
bar under precisely the same amount of circumstantial testimony, 
unless he could offer some better and more plausible vindication 
than the administration have yet produced, I verily believe there 
is not a jury in the land who would give him a verdict of acquit- 
tal, any more than they would acquit a person charged with 
stealing, who was caught on the premises in which the theft was 
committed, or a person accused of assassination, whose hand 
was still wet with the blood of his prostrate victim. 

But let us suppose a case a little more analogous to the one 
before us. Go back a century or two to the history of alchemy. 
Enter the laboratory of an ancient alchemiist. See his stills and 
his caldrons, his alembics and his elixirs. See him toiling and 
drudging, and promising too, night and day, to turn that heap 
of base metal into gold. Presently there is an ominous rumbling, 
then a crash, then a general explosion, and the whole building 
and apparatus are instantly involved in flames and ruin. Will 
anybody go about now to see if there was not a leak in this 
still, or a crack in that caldron, a flaw in the alembic, or a false 
ingredient in the elixir, which caused this fearful catastrophe ? 
Or whether it did not result from overaction on the part of 
some of those engaged in the process ? Will not all, at once, 
agree that it was the natural result of so mad and absurd an 
experiment — the legitimate termination of all alchemy? And 
what but alchemy has been going on in the country for six years 
past? Mitford tells us, in his history of Greece, that Dionysius 
of Syracuse, whose official title was General Autocrator or the 
Autocrat-General, made some humble efforts to reform the cur- 
rency of the people over whom he ruled. He attempted it by 
an emission of pewter notes. The classical adulators of the 
day seem never to have presented this precedent to the eye 
of the Autocrat- General, of the present age, or possibly his 
dreams of a metallic currency might long ago have been ac- 
complished. But hitherto he has been content with nothing 
but gold. And fonder even than the alchemists of old, he has 



THE SUB-TREASURY SYSTEM. 239 

essayed to turn into that precious material, not heaps of baser 
metal merely, but piles of paper and bales of rags. What 
wonder is it, not only that no gold has glittered, but that the 
laboratory has exploded and even the rags themselves are ruined! 
Mr. Chairman, the gentleman from Marblehead amused us not 
a little the other day in describing the eminent medical skill of 
Dr. Jackson, as he was pleased to denominate the late President 
of the United States. I was aware. Sir, that a Doctorate of 
Laws had been conferred on that distinguished individual by a 
neio-hborins University. But it has been reserved for the gentle- 
man from Marblehead to bestow upon him the diploma of Me- 
dicine. Doubtless he has proved himself equally entitled to either 
honor. But the Faculty would, I think, hardly be flattered by 
the grounds which have been given of his claim to the latter 
laurel; to wit, his most successful practice in promoting the 
circulation of the country. 

A few days before the gentleman made this allusion, I had 
received from a respected friend of mine in the town of Barre, 
(General Lee,) lately a member of this House, — a soldier in the 
Revolution, who stood at the siege of Yorktown, and witnessed 
the surrender of Cornwallis, — a few of the regular old Continental 
Notes, which are almost as redeemable now as they ever were, 
but which I shall put by as a curiosity without any fear of los- 
ing either principal or interest. I observed, on examining them, 
that they all had some sort of motto inscribed upon their face. 
On one, were the Latin words, depressa resurgit; but they were 
no less doomed to be a lie than if they had been written in plain 
English ; for though the notes were abundantly depressed, they 
never saw the promised resurrection. On another, was a picture 
of the Sun just on the edge of the horizon, but though it was 
duly labelled "rising," the sequel has shown that the artist was 
mistaken, and had really depicted a setting luminary. Sir, there 
have been enough of these deceptive inscriptions upon irredeem- 
able paper. And as I listened to the gentleman from Marble- 
head the other day, I could not help thinking what an excellent 
motto for one of the irredeemable notes of the present day — a 
Commonwealth Bank bill, for example — that old French epi- 
taph on the man who was well, took physic and died, would 



240 THE SUB-TREASURY SYSTEM. 

make. I would even recommend to the government itself, as I 
have this moment learned that they are proposing to emit a new- 
batch of Treasury notes, to have engraved upon their surface, not 
one of the old delusory stale baits of Revolutionary times, but 
this plain and wholesome, however unpalatable truth, — "I was 
well ; Doctor Jackson tried to make me better, and here I am — 
dead, irredeemable, rag money." {/ 

I might have added. Sir, that on a third class of these Conti- 
nental bills was a motto which the present administration seem 
actually to have adopted. Under a dial plate, with its hands and 
figures duly disposed, there was printed in glaring capitals, this 
most emphatic and peremptory mandate, — ^^ Mind your Busi- 
nessP It is plain, Sir, that this is but an unceremonious 
abridgment of the well-remembered maxim, with which a distin- 
guished senator from New York (Mr. Wright) introduced the 
discussion on the Sub- Treasury System. " Let the govern- 
ment mind their business," said he, " and let the people mind 
theirs." I should rather have said that this latter was only an 
amplification and development of the former. We now see 
where this maxim originated, and with what financial measures 
it was associated. Upon the face of an irredeemable note it 
was first inscribed, and there it still appropriately belongs. And 
depend upon it. Sir, until it is expunged from the principles and 
policy of the national administration, it will perpetually endanger, 
if not permanently destroy, the redeemability of the whole paper 
medium of the country. — But I am anticipating a part of my 
remarks for which I am not yet ready, and I turn to the more 
immediate subject of the resolutions before us. 

What, Mr. Chairman, is the Sub-Treasury Bill ? Why, Sir, 
the first and strongest impression which a perusal of that Bill 
has made upon my mind, is, that it is a measure designed and 
calculated to carry out to its completion this late financial policy 
of the national administration, which I have just described as so 
ruinous to the country. The present incumbent of the Presi- 
dency came into power, we all know, with a pledge upon his 
lips to complete and perpetuate the policy of his predecessor. 
Sir, the Sub-Treasury Bill is an entire and perfect fulfilment of 
both the letter and the spirit of that pledge. It is nothing more 



THE SUB-TREASURY SYSTEM. 241 

nor less than this fatal policy itself drawn up into a bill, and 
presented to Congress to be ratified and enacted. To subject 
the bill to a kind of chemical analysis, — it is one third Bank 
Veto, one third Removal of the Deposits, and one third Treasury 
Order. And the operation of the whole composition, as I ho- 
nestly believe, will be to perpetuate among the people those 
sufferings and distresses, those perils and pains, that alternate 
rush of blood and stoppage of circulation, which have been 
their miserable lot for the last few years. 

But let us look a little more closely at the particular provisions 
of the bill. Gentlemen who have not had the benefit of a copy 
of it may be glad to hear exactly what it provides. I will endea- 
vor to tell them. There is to be, in the first place, a great iron 
safe in the new Treasury building at Washington, which is to 
be called, par eminence., the Treasury, and to be under the charge 
of the Treasurer of the United States. There is to be another 
great iron safe in the National Mint at Philadelphia, under the 
charge of the Treasurer of the IMint, and another in the Branch 
]Mint at New Orleans, under the charge of the Treasurer of the 
Branch Mint. There is to be another great iron safe in the new 
custom house at New York, and another in the new custom 
house at Boston, and two more are to be provided in some con- 
venient receptacles at St. Louis and Charleston. These four 
latter safes are to be under the key of four Receivers-General to 
be appointed by the President. And in these seven safes — 
whether they are to be Gayler's patent, or Asbestos, or the genu- 
ine Salamanders, the bill does not say, but some of its friends 
can certainly tell us, as they are said to be already far advanced 
in the process of construction — in these seven iron safes, under 
the direction, doubtless, of seven wise, as well as faithful, men, 
the main body of the public moneys is henceforth to be deposited. 
These are to be the principal Sub- Treasuries of the system; 
these are the seven hills, if I may so speak, on which this new 
financial empire is to be founded. 

In the mean time, various collectors of customs and their 
deputies, together with all the postmasters, and all the land- 
receivers throughout the Union, are to have their safes also, on 
a smaller scale, and are to act upon the good old motto of getting 
21 



242 THE SUB-TREASURY SYSTEM. 

what they can and keeping what they get. And over these 
public moneys thus deposited, the Secretary of the Treasury, 
who is to be the Super- Treasurer of the whole system, is to have 
an unlimited power of transfer , with authority to remove the 
specie from safe to safe, by drafts or bodily transportation, when- 
ever and in whatever amounts the public service may, in his 
judgment, require, and also to appoint, from time to time, special 
commissioners, in such numbers and with such pay as he may 
think proper, to play the part of custodes custodmit, to examine 
the contents of the various safes, and to inspect the accounts of 
their various keepers. Finally, these keepers are prohibited under 
heavy penalties from using themselves, or loaning to others, the 
funds in their custody, and, what is far the most important pro- 
vision of the whole, these funds are to be collected, from and 
after December, 1843, in nothing but gold and silver or govern- 
ment paper, while between now and then there is to be a gradual 
advancement, by five successive annual and equal approaches, 
to this blessed consummation of the whole scheme. 

Sir, strip the bill of its machinery, and if I mistake not, there 
are three great characterizing features to the system, regarded 
simply as a financial system. 

1. The public moneys are to be kept no longer in a bank or 
banks, but in the hands of individual agents selected by the 
Executive. 

2. The public moneys are to be collected no longer in bank 
paper, whether convertible or inconvertible, but exclusively in 
gold and silver, or in government paper. 

3. The public moneys are no longer to be the basis of bank 
loans or discounts, nor, indeed, as the bill professes, of any loans 
or discounts whatever. 

Now, Mr. Chairman, look at these provisions in the most 
favorable light, and they constitute a complete abandonment by 
the government of banks, of bank paper, and of the bank credit 
system to their fate. So far as government power, government 
patronage, and government influence and countenance go, it is 
plain, there are to be no banks, there is to be no bank paper, 
there is to be no credit system, or, at least, none such as we now 
have. The bill is in this respect precisely what it professes to be, 



THE SUB-TREASURY SYSTEM. 243 

a bill of divorce, of utter and unqualified divorce, without pro- 
vision for maintenance or allowance of alimony, between the 
national government and our existing institutions of banking 
and credit. 

But what is its design ? Clearly, clearly. Sir, to crush, de- 
molish, and annihilate the whole banking and credit system of 
the country. The great statesman of Kentucky has demon- 
strated this position with a precision and a fulness leaving 
nothing to be added. Or if any thing were required to clinch 
and rivet the chain of evidence, it has been more than supplied 
by the powerful eifort of one of our own Senators, Mr. Davis. 
I will not trespass upon the time of the House by reading ex- 
tracts from either of these speeches, nor yet by repeating the 
arguments which they contain. No man will have done his 
duty to this question who does not read them for himself. But 
I beg leave very briefly to allude to another piece of testimony 
upon this point, upon which no suspicion can be cast as being 
furnished by an enemy of the system we are discussing. I hold 
in my hand. Sir, a little stereotyped pamphlet which I ven- 
ture to say has done as much mischief in its day, as any that 
ever saw ink and type. It is the well-known work of Mr. 
Gouge, a gentleman who is at this moment, I believe, in the 
Treasury Department at Washington. And I think no one 
will contradict the assertion, that it has been, and is still, 
the financial manual of the national administration. It was 
published in 1S33, and it contains, in company with a good 
deal of valuable historical information, a compendious detail of 
all the principles, practices, and projects, past, present, and to 
come, by which that administration has proposed to reform the 
national currency. The Sub-Treasury system, especially, iron 
safes and all, is mapped out in its pages with the most minute 
precision. And what is the great result, the glorious consum- 
mation, to which it is to lead ? It is, to use Mr. Gouge's own 
words, " the abolition of incorporated paper money banks," and 
" the downfall of moneyed corporations." Here, Sir, we have 
it in plain, clear, undisguised language, and from the lips, too, 
of a government witness. Let the gentleman from Gloucester 
discredit him, if he can. 



244 THE SUB-TREASURY SYSTEM. 

But why resort to any such testimony ? Who denies that 
this has been, and still is, the ultimate design of the late and 
present administrations ? "Who doubts it ? Who can doubt it, 
that has paid any attention to the doctrines or the deeds of those 
administrations for seven years past ? Has not their whole 
course and their whole cry in that long period been against 
banks and bank paper and bank credits ? Has not the welkin 
rung again with their loud halloos of " perish commerce, perish 
credit ; " " those who trade on borrowed capital ought to 
break ?" Has not the very title by which they have chosen to 
be politically known and distinguished, been " Anti-Bank- Mo- 
nopoly Democrats ? " Do they now disown that title ? Do 
they disavow the design which it implies ? Why, Sir, on ano- 
ther question the gentleman from Gloucester attempted to make 
some sort of discrimination in his hostility to banks, and said 
something about his friendship for honest banks. Had such a 
distinction fallen from another mouth, I should have expected 
to hear the gentleman himself responding to it with a disquisi- 
tion upon white crows ! But neither in the three days' speech 
which he has just concluded, nor in the shorter but not less able 
argument of the gentleman from Marblehead, on the question 
before us, have I heard a syllable which recognized any such 
distinction, or which betokened any thing but an uncompro- 
mising and indiscriminate opposition to the whole banking sys- 
tem of the country. 

And now, Mr. Chairman, not only do I fully and firmly be- 
lieve that it is the design of this Sub-Treasury scheme to over- 
throw and extirpate our present institutions of credit and cur- 
rency, but, for one, I can hardly bring myself to doubt that, 
if it be carried out without alteration or evasion, this will be 
its ultimate effect. It is plain that the adoption of this mea- 
sure will be something besides a mere abandonment of these 
institutions to their fate, and the withdrawal of that salutary 
regulating power which government has hitherto exerted over 
them. It is no measure of mere negative operation. The pro- 
vision by which bank bills are no longer to pass at the receipt 
of customs, cannot fail to create a constant drain and demand 
upon the banks for their specie, to be employed in Treasury 



THE SUB-TREASURY SYSTEM. 245 

payments or to be hoarded in Sub-Treasury safes. While at 
the same moment, the whole suspicion and dishonor of govern- 
ment rejection will be cast upon the paper which is in use 
among the people. Why, Sir, what does this provision amount 
to, but a perpetual legislative protest against banks — a perpe- 
tual certificate of discredit, executed under the hand and seal of 
the government, and stamped upon the face of every bank-note 
in the country ? 

But the direct and immediate operation of this bill, bad as I 
conceive it inevitably must be, will be insignificant, in my judg- 
ment, compared with its indirect and ulterior influence, if it be 
passed and persisted in. Hitherto the whole war upon the 
banks has been carried on by the Executive of the nation, sin- 
gle-handed and alone. Congress has never yet taken one step 
towards that battle-field. Congress, certainly, has never yet 
lifted a finger in the fight, except to check or counteract the 
rash movements of the Executive. Yes, Sir, this whole strife 
and turmoil against the currency, with all its alarms and am- 
bushes, all its sieges and surrenders, all its onslaughts, disasters, 
and catastrophes, has been exclusively of Executive setting-on 
and of Executive carrying-on. But Congress is now at length 
compelled to act. And let Congress now at length sustain the 
past and present Executive in their career, let the Representa- 
tives of the people now at last adopt, ratify, and enact, the po- 
licy which this bill proposes to complete and perpetuate, and let 
the people themselves sustain their Representatives in so doing, 
and the fate of the American credit system will be regarded, and 
justly regarded, as sealed, and its doom as irrevocably pro- 
nounced. If this bill itself will not work its dissolution, some- 
thing else will be devised that will. There will be no stopping 
half way. This measure once adopted by the government, they 
will be 

" Slept in so far, that, should they wade no more, 
Returning were as tedious as go o'er." 

And over they will go. They will follow up their success in the 
national councils. Their friends in the State Legislatures will 
rally with renewed courage in the same cause. And not one 

21* 



246 THE SUB-TREASURY SYSTEM. 

stone upon another will be left of our existing institutions of 
banking and credit, that will not be speedily cast down. And 
what will be built up on the ruins ? What is to be the sub- 
stitute ? 

But before turning to the system that is to be, Mr. Chairman, 
I desire to pay a passing, and, it may be, a parting tribute to 
the system that is. Not that I am about to attempt any elabo- 
rate defence of our existing credit system, or any philosophical 
analysis of the relations between capital and labor. I see giant 
tracks, freshly, deeply, ineffaceably impressed at every turn of 
this route, and I shrink from placing my tiny footprints in 
such overwhelming contrast. But there is one idea, which has 
been the burden of more than one speech in this House, from 
the gentleman from Gloucester in years past, and which has re- 
ceived its full share of repetition on the present occasion, of 
which I cannot forbear to speak. It is this, — that in the fluctu- 
ations of our circulating medium, the wages of labor are the 
last things to rise and the first things to fall, and that therefore 
our present system is peculiarly oppressive to the laboring 
classes. 

Now, Sir, in the first place let me remind the gentleman that 
these fluctuations are not the peculiar attributes of our currency, 
or our credit system. They belong, as I have once before in- 
sisted, to commerce, — to all commerce, whether carried on 
through the medium of metals, or of paper, or of both united 
and mutually convertible. They may be, and doubtless are, 
rather more frequent and rather more extensive, where the me- 
dium is mixt, than where it is purely metallic. But they not 
infrequently have no relation at all to the nature or amount of 
that medium, whatever it is, and depend for their origin and 
extent, upon moral, social, or political causes. If he will away 
with them altogether, he must away with commerce altogether. 
If he will not endure the wave, he must dry up or stagnate the 
ocean. 

But, in the second place, I maintain that, even admitting the 
position that in these fluctuations, however produced, the wages 
of labor are the last things to rise and the first things to fall, the 
laboring classes lose infinitely and out of all comparison less by 



THE SUC-TREASURY SYSTEM. 247 

this accidental disadvantage, than they gain, by the new stimu- 
lus to enterprise, by the new and varied demands for art and 
industry, which these very fluctuations are continually creating. 
But leaving this point also to rest on its own bare statement, 
and to make its own appeal to the plain common sense and 
practical information of the House, I beg leave to state my 
strong and serious doubts whether the gentleman's premises are 
susceptible of proof, or whether, whatever truth the maxim with 
which he starts may be proved to possess in the old world, it is 
in any degi-ee applicable to the condition and circumstances of 
the new. Everybody knows. Sir, that there are hundreds of the 
stereotyped dogmas of the English and French economists, 
which find nothing to rest upon, nothing to attach to, among 
us. And this idea, that the wages of labor are the last things 
to rise and the first things to fall, seems to be one of them. 
And upon this point again, I will refer the gentleman from 
Gloucester to the production of one of his own political party. 
Mr. Lesrare. of South Carolina, an administration member of 
Congress, but far too enlightened to approve their financial 
policy, and far too independent to follow them in any policy 
which he does not approve, in a most able and eloquent speech, 
delivered upon this very subject, during the late extra session of 
Congress, speaks thus of the doctrine I am discussing: — 

'' It may be so," says he, " in countries where the supply of 
labor is greater than the demand, but the very reverse is most 
certainly the fact here, where the demand, especially when stimu- 
lated by an extraordinary increase, real or fictitious, is always 
greater than the supply. All price," he proceeds, " is a question 
of power or of relative necessity between two parties, and every- 
body knows that in a period of excitement here, wages rise im- 
mediately, and out of all proportion more than any thing else, 
because the population of this country is entirely inadequate to 
its wants." 

Sir, these remarks seem to me not only to be well-founded 
and well-reasoned, but to be obviously and undeniably true. 
Look at the condition of our laboring classes, and see if it be 
not so. The gentleman from Gloucester complained the other 
day that he could never speak about the miseries, the oppres- 



248 THE SUB-TREASURY SYSTEM. 

sions, the grinding of faces and " grinding of live bones " of 
the poor, without exciting a smile upon the countenances of 
all who heard him. I do not wonder at it, Sir. How can we 
help indulging, if not in a smile of incredulity as to their exist- 
ence elsewhere, certainly in a smile of satisfaction that they 
have no shadow of existence here ? Who ever saw or heard 
of any such thing within these United States ? Where on 
the face of the globe is labor half as well fed, half as well 
clad, half as well educated, as in this country of credit, this land 
of banking corporations ? Why else are such cargoes, not of 
goods and chattels only, but of bodies and souls, annually 
emptied upon our shores, — not as formerly, I thank Heaven, to 
become merchandise themselves, and to put on the manacles of 
slavery, but to enter at once into the open avenues of American 
industry, to reap at once the unequalled returns of American 
enterprise, and to enjoy at once the surpassing privileges of 
American liberty. Sir, I will not argue this position further. 
Let me only say that the gentleman from Gloucester seems to 
me to underrate the intelligence, the happiness, the independence 
of condition, and elevation of character, of the American la- 
borer, and it is not perhaps surprising, therefore, that he should 
also under-estimate the value of that credit system, which has 
been one of the main instruments of liberty in producing these 
results. 

But the banking system, the banking law of Massachusetts, 
which has been copied into the codes of other States, and is 
now substantially that of the whole country, — let me, before I 
quit this topic, do an act of justice to this much abused system. 
Let me at least show to the House that it is not everywhere 
held in such low esteem as it seems to be among us. I have 
here. Sir, the speech of Mr. William Clay* — a member of the 
British House of Commons — a whig member, let me assure 
the gentleman from Gloucester — a radical member, even, I be- 
lieve. It is the speech by which he introduced the motion for 
the late interesting and instructive investigation into the joint 
stock banking system of England. The same pamphlet con- 

* Now Sir William Clay, Bart. 



THE SUB-TREASURY SYSTEM. 249 

tains, also, a very able reply by Mr. Clay to a notice of his 
speech contained in the Edinburgh Review, and which from 
intrinsic evidence only, I imagine to have been written by Mr. 
McCuUoch. In these productions, Mr. Clay evinces himself no 
superficial expositor of the art and mystery of banking, and dis- 
plays an intimate acquaintance with the various systems now 
or heretofore in use. And what system, think you. Sir, he con- 
siders first and best ? Whose wimple banking law, from the 
enacting clause down to the very date of Executive approba- 
tion, has he appended to his pamphlet as a model for the future 
banking legislation of Great Britain ? Why, here it is, Sir, in 
black and white, whole and entire, just as it was adopted in 
1829, the now despised and derided banking law of Massachu- 
setts, — which Mr. Clay considers, and for reasons to which I be- 
lieve a great majority of the House, were they candidly to ex- 
amine them, would give a ready assent, to be upon the whole 
the best system ever yet devised ! 

Now, Sir, I do not pretend to regard our system as indeed a 
perfect one. I agree with those who have pronounced many of 
its resti'ictions loose and inoperative. On the other hand, too, I 
hold some of its exactions to be too severe and strict. To say 
nothing of that, of which others have said so much, the State 
tax, — the provision which requires one half of the capital stock 
to be paid in gold and silver, is, in my opinion, unreasonably 
rigid, and leads as necessarily to evasion and fraud as a tariff of 
excessive duties does to perjury and smuggling. On the con- 
trary, the limitation of bank issues to twenty-five per cent, 
above the capital, is in effect no limitation at all, but rather 
an imprudent and extravagant license. In other respects, also, 
the system is doubtless susceptible of improvement. And sooner 
or later I hope to see the results of past, and especially of pre- 
sent, experience ingrafted and incorporated into it. But I main- 
tain, notwithstanding, that the system, as it is, is in the main a 
good system, and that whatever mischiefs have occurred during 
its recent operation, have resulted from other causes than its de- 
fects. Has it been extended of late out of all proportion to the 
real wants of the community ? Its long accustomed regulator 
has been destroyed. Has it been seduced within a few years 



250 THE SUE-TREASURY SYSTEM. 

from its natural and legitimate sphere of action ? The corrupt- 
ing influence of the national government has been upon it, de- 
scending, like Jupiter upon Panae in the fable, in a shower of 
gold. Has it fallen, here and there, under the control of un- 
principled men? What system is secure from such a fate 2 
But the system itself, I repeat it. Sir, is, still and notwithstand- 
ing, a good system, a well-considered system, a safe system. 
Place it only in honest han^s, — as indeed all that is left of it, I 
doubt not, now already is, — restore to it its old, original regu- 
lator, and remove it at once from both the corruptions and the 
assaults, the embraces and the repulses, the favors and the 
frowns of an arbitrary executive, and it will again produce, as it 
has from its first establishment almost uniformly produced, 
nothing but the convenience and the prosperity of the people. 
I do protest, therefore, against the denunciations which have 
been so unceasingly dealt out against the banking system of 
Massachusetts. And most especially and most emphatically do 
I protest against all or any part of the bankruptcies, embezzle- 
ments, and frauds of the day being charged directly or indirectly 
to its account. 

Gentlemen seem to imagine they have hit upon an unanswera- 
ble argument against the system of which I am speaking, when 
they exclaim, — " It may be a good system for honest men, but 
then it is an equally good system for rogues." Why, do gen- 
tlemen forget, that the same argument may be arrayed against 
our whole Republican system, whether of State or Nation ? 
Do gentlemen forget that our fathers inscribed it on the first 
page of our own Constitution, that a constant adherence to 
the principles of piety, justice, moderation, and frugality, is 
absolutely necessary to the maintenance of a free government ? 
Did not Montesquieu lay it down long ago, that while fear was 
the principle of a despotism and honor of a monarchy, virtue 
was the only principle, the foundation principle of a Republic ? 
Sir, as I was looking over the Spirit of Laws a few hours ago, 
to verify my remembrance of this remark, I observed in imme- 
diate connection with it the following passage, — " When virtue 
is banished (from a Republic) ambition invades the minds of 
those who are disposed to receive it, and avarice possesses the 



THE SUB-TREASURY SYSTEM. 251 

whole community. . . . The members of the Common- 
wealth riot on the public spoils, and its strength is only the 
power of a few, and the licentiousness of many." Now, Mr. 
Chairman, I would not be thought to imply, that in my opi- 
nion all virtue has been banished from our land. I pray God 
that such an ostracism may never stain our annals! If it 
should. Sir, they will soon cease to be the annals of a Republic. 
But do we not see around us signs enough to convince us that 
virtue, if not banished, is not among us, at the present moment, 
in her full might and majesty ? See we not inordinate ambi- 
tion invading some minds, and inordinate avarice others? See 
we not something of the power of a few, and of the licentious- 
ness of many ? See we not the officers, if not the members, of 
the National Commonwealth, rioting on the public spoils ? 

It cannot be denied that there has been exhibited, during 
the past year, a bankruptcy of private character — a bank- 
ruptcy which makes him that suffers it " poor indeed," and 
compared with which, the bankruptcy which commonly bears 
that name is but the loss of vile and worthless trash, — mani- 
festing itself not merely or mainly in banks, but in all depart- 
ments of business, in all walks of life, and in almost all parts of 
the covmtry, and constituting to my eye, infinitely the worst 
feature of the whole crisis. And to what is it to be ascribed ? 
Sir, I speak not now for any party effect. I wish to wound the 
feelings of no member and of no class of members in this House. 
There are those among my political opponents, here and else- 
where, whom I heartily respect. There are those for whom I 
feel a cordial esteem and friendship. There are those to whom 
I am bound by the closest personal ties. But I must speak out 
my honest and conscientious opinions. And here from my soul 
I express my belief, that the administration of our national 
affairs for the last eight years — its disregard of laws — its in- 
fractions of solemn treaties — its violations of the Constitution 
— its proscription for political opinions' sake — its frauds and 
peculations in the public offices — its howl after gold, as it was 
termed by Mr. Clay — its growl against credit, as it was called 
by one of my colleagues — its screech after spoils, to add a not 
less significant term of my own — has done more to lower the 



252 THE SUC-TREASURY SYSTEM. 

standard of morality in our land, and to break down the founda- 
tion principle of our Republic, than all the banks and all the de- 
fects in all the banks that ever existed. Sir, that administration 
has been one long, loud, unintermitted appeal to the worst and 
meanest prejudices of the human breast. 

Flectere si nequeo Superos, Acheronta movebo. 

If I cannot have the higher powers of intelligence and reason 
on my side, I will at least stir up the passions to my support. 
This has been its motto. And we have seen all that was false 
in principle and false in practice, moral, social, and religious, as 
well as political, mustering and clustering under its banner. 

But, not to dwell longer on this idea, let me say, in returning 
to our banking system, that the banks and the country have 
been suffering lately under one and the same evil. The directors 
of the nation have exceeded their powers, have mismanaged 
their affairs, and perverted the funds intrusted to them to their 
own purposes. And what have the worst directors of the worst 
banks done but follow the example ? And let me add that the 
remedy must be the same in both cases. The people in the first 
instance, and the stockholders in the last, must turn out these 
faithless directors at the earliest opportunity, and take care to 
choose those who can be trusted in their stead. 

But, dropping this analogy, JMr. Chairman, let me rest a 
moment on the position that the great remedy for the present 
abuses of our banking system lies with the stockholders. Sir, 
you have given to these stockholders plenary power to make their 
own by-laws. In these by-laws they may place such restrictions 
upon the loans to directors, or the loans to other individuals, as 
they may see fit. They may provide, also, for periodical exhibits 
of notes, securities, and books, or for stated examinations into 
the condition of the banks by committees of their own number. 
And to such by-laws, rather than to the public statutes of the 
State, do such provisions peculiarly belong. And, Sir, if I 
wanted to bring about a thorough and searching reform, not in 
our banking system itself, indeed, but in the whole operation and 
conduct of that system, I would summon a meeting of stock- 
holders at Faneuil Hall or elsewhere. I would raise a Commit- 



THE SUB-TREASURY SYSTEM. 253 

tee of which the author of a pamphlet, which has received no 
little share of commendation from both parties in this House, 
(Hon. Nathan Appleton,) should be the chairman, and I would 
have a code of by-laws drafted with particular reference to the 
recent developments in some of our city banks. Depend upon 
it, Sir, that under the impulse of the existing exigency, such a 
code would require no legislative sanction from us or our suc- 
cessors, to secure its adoption and enforcement in every bank 
in the Commonwealth. 

But, Mr. Chairman, this banking system of ours is to be over- 
thrown, if the government can in any way achieve it, — and that 
they can, if sustained in the Sub-Treasury scheme, I have already 
expressed my belief. And what, again I ask, is to be the substi- 
tute? Why, Mr. Gouge tells us, and I doubt not, truly, so far 
as he goes, that private banking establishments will naturally 
and necessarily follow the downfall of the present institutions ; 
and he refers us to the ancient Jews and Romans for examples 
of their convenience and utility. Now, Sir, though I confess 
that I have had quite enough of old Eoman financiering, and 
have no very reverential regard for the tables of the ancient 
Jewish money-changers, I have yet little or no objection to pri- 
vate banking establishments. I was quite content that the law 
prohibiting them should be abolished, as it was, on the revision 
of our statutes. But, Sir, I cannot see the expediency or justice 
of making way for their erection by the overthrow of the joint 
stock system. I cannot see why these moneyed corporations, 
as they are called, into whose common stock the widow can cast 
in of her mite as well as the rich of their abundance, and through 
which men of small means can obtain the securities and reap 
the rewards of extensive and systematic establishments, should 
be broken up, — in order that individual rich men may enjoy a 
monopoly of the banking business. Certainly, it seems strange 
to me, that while England and France, under the influence of 
more liberal councils than they have before enjoyed, are follow- 
ing our example, and greatly extending their joint stock banks, 
we should be going back to an exclusive patronage of those 
great private establishments, which have hitherto overshadowed 
the pecuniary concerns of Europe. 

22 



254 THE SUB-TREASURT SYSTEM. 

But this is not the only substitute which is meditated, if not 
proposed, in this Sub- Treasury bill. Sir, it has been repeatedly 
remarked by the most distinguished opponents of this bill in 
Congress, and it was strongly maintained by the Governor in 
his annual message, that this bill contained the germ of a great 
government bank — not a national bank, such as we have hither- 
to had, but an Executive bank, under the sole and exclusive con- 
trol of the Executive department. And who can fail to see that 
it does contain the germ, and something more than the germ, 
of such an establishment? The public funds are to be kept in 
the safes. And the Secretary of the Treasury is to make his 
payments by drafts upon the keepers. But what is to become 
of these drafts? Think you they will make a speedy transit to 
their respective drawees ? The bill itself has a provision on this 
point pregnant with meaning. It is, that the Secretary shall 
take means to secure their punctual presentation. But what 
these means are to be, the bill does not specify, nor can any 
effectual means be devised. The Secretary may call for their 
presentation with ever so peremptory and menacing a tone. But 
will they come if he does call? No, Sir, the people of this 
country have been too long habituated to the lightness and con- 
venience of paper, to burden themselves unnecessarily with bags 
of silver or kegs of gold. These drafts will thus either remain 
in the ordinary channels of circulation, or will become the sub- 
jects of a griping brokerage between the debtors and creditors 
of the government. And it is to these, doubtless, as well as to 
the Treasury notes proper, that the phrase, government paper, in 
the bill, refers. 

But what, in the mean time, is to become of the specie? 
Doubtless, it is intended to be always snugly stowed away in 
the iron safes. Doubtless, it is intended to be the subject of no 
light-fingering. Nothing less weighty than the hand of the 
Secretary himself, duly impressing itself on a Treasury draft, is 
ever to stir it from its place. So it was. Sir, so it was precisely 
with the specie in the old, original bank of Amsterdam, to which 
this system has a striking analogy. The specie there was never 
to be touched, and nobody supposed it ever was touched. But 
when the French entered Amsterdam in 1794, it was discovered 



THE SUB-TREASURY SYSTEM. 255 

that millions upon millions had been secretly loaned out by the 
bank to the India Company and others! The gentleman from 
Gloucester insists on historical facts. Here is one which I com- 
mend to his remembrance. 

But even supposing that not a dollar of this specie should be 
loaned or used secretly and by stealth, this Sub-Treasury system 
will no sooner be fairly established, than the government itself 
will, in my belief, come forward wdth a proposition that the 
public funds not immediately in use should again become the 
basis of loans and discounts. They will find, as the Bank of 
Amsterdam found, that a certain small proportion of their specie 
will answer all the demands which are made upon them for hard 
money. And why, they will ask, and will ask with great force, — 
why should the people's gold and silver lie idle ; why should it 
be withheld from the service of the people ; why not allow it 
again, as it was for the first eight-and-forty years of our national 
existence, to be employed as a help and a stimulus to their in- 
dustry and enterprise ? And how will such a proposition be 
resisted ? Sir, it will not be resisted. No party could effect- 
ually oppose it. It \vould seem to be opposing the right of the 
people to their own. Depend upon it, Mr. Chairman, let this 
Sub-Treasury system once obtain foothold on our soil, and this 
proposition will be made, and will be sustained. Your receivers- 
general and mint directors, your collectors and land agents and 
postmasters will then be the great bankers of the nation. Your 
Executive Magistrate will preside over the system. And the 
whole amount of the public deposits will be dealt out, in sums 
to suit, to those who shall have proved themselves most deserv- 
ing of government favors. And thus. Sir, this long-looked for 
divorce of bank and state, will turn out, like most other divorces 
of those in power, to have been only the prelude for another 
marriage, and that, the fatal marriage of purse and sword ! 

Gentlemen will tell me there is nothing of all this in the bill 
itself. Sir, there are a great many things not in the bill, w^hich 
yet belong inseparably to the system. Does anybody imagine that 
the finances of this great nation can be carried on by the paltry 
machinery which this bill in its own terms provides? Is it 
imagined that these receivers-general, for instance, are to do the 



256 THE SUE-TREASURY SYSTEM. 

whole of their own work in person ? And, if not, how many 
clerks — let me ask the gentleman from Gloucester, or the gentle- 
man from Marblehead, for I would not pretend to anticipate 
the settlement of their rival claims — how many clerks do they 
expect to employ in this arduous and responsible station? Sir, 
I feel some curiosity to see the details of this " simple plan," as it 
has been called by its friends. And should it ever be adopted and 
put in practice, as Heaven grant it never may, whichever of the 
gentlemen should be successful in his claims to the Boston ap- 
pointment, he will not, I hope, take it amiss, if I should look in 
upon him in his new vocation. I shall certainly be disappointed, 
Sir, if I do not find him attended by some half hundred hands, 
surrounded by some scores of safes and vaults and strong boxes, 
with here and there a heap of silver and gold, it may be, glitter- 
ing in open view, in remembrance of his former hard-money 
principles, and all, behind porticos and colonnades not a whit less 
magnificent than those within which, as the gentleman from 
Gloucester said on Saturday, "the monster had his residence 
during his lifetime I " This last part of the picture, Sir,* is not 
drawn from imagination. The new custom house at Boston, 
in which the receiver-general of this region is to have his official 
residence, is expected, I believe, to be quite equal even to the 
beautiful banking-house of Mr. Biddle, at Philadelphia. 

Mr. Chairman, the gentleman from Marblehead remarked the 
other day, that his party was " a party of progress." Sir, this 
bill is worthy of such a party. It is evidently a bill of progress. 
It provides pretty well for the Generals, though even these, I 
imagine, will be multiplied far beyond the number proposed, 
when once the system is established. But the Army is wholly 
unprovided for — the new standing army of office-holders, by 
which the thousand details of the system must ultimately be 
discharged. Yes, Sir, this bill is eminently and fearfully a bill 
of progress, — a progress to which, when this first step is fairly 
taken, I can see no stop and no end until the prosperity and 
liberties of the people are entirely overrun and trampled on. 

The gentleman from Gloucester, also, gave us an instructive 
piece of history in the course of his speech. He reminded us 
of the origin of the Bank of England, and recounted how it 



THE SUB-TREASURY SYSTEM. 257 

was smuggled into existence, on the back of a beer and ale bill, 
as a mere rider. Nobody dreamed, he said, that they were mak- 
ing a bank; and I dare say the gentleman himself does not 
dream that he is now helping to make a bank, in advocating 
the cause of this Sub-Treasury bill. But he may one day or 
other wake up and find it in existence, and, haply, himself at 
the head of it. Why, Sir, has he, has anybody forgotten Gene- 
ral Jackson's early and often-repeated proposition of " a bank 
founded on the credit and revenues of the country ? " Has that 
proposition ever been disavowed, either by its original author or 
any one of his followers ? Do those of them here present, all 
or any of them, disavow it now? 

But I will dwell no longer on what this system may be. The 
bill is quite bad enough as it is. It proposes a total abandon- 
ment of the long tried and long approved policy of the country. 
Heretofore, w^e all know, a national bank has been the fiscal 
agent of the government, and among many other important 
services to the country, has furnished a uniform currency for its 
commerce. Henceforth, this, and every thing like it, is to be 
discarded. Hitherto the bills of all specie paying banks have 
been received in payment of public dues. Hereafter, this whole- 
some discrimination between redeemable and irredeemable paper, 
is to be utterly abandoned, and both are to be involved in a 
common proscription. Heretofore, the people's moneys, when 
not in actual employment in the public service, have been the 
basis of bank loans and discounts, and who can calculate the 
aggregate amount they have added in time past to the wealth 
of the country, to the wages of industry, to the general prosper- 
ity of the people ? Henceforth they are to be locked up in iron 
chests, — about as useful to their owners, as the talent of the 
unprofitable servant, hid in a napkin. Sir, I cannot argue this 
case myself, much less could I listen to the argument of the 
gentleman from Gloucester, without being reminded of a pam- 
phlet on the currency, written by Sir Walter Scott, under the 
humorous title of Malachi Malagrowther, in 1826, when the 
British Parliament were about trying some new financial experi- 
ment upon Scotland. The whole of it might be used here to 
advantage, but I confine himself to the concluding passage, — 
22 * 



258 THE SUB-TREASURY SYSTEM. 

" I have read," says he, " I think in Lucian, of two architects, 
who contended before the people at Athens which should be 
intrusted with the task of erecting a temple. The first made 
a luminous oration, showing that he was, in theory at least, 
master of his art, and spoke with such glibness in the hard terms 
of architecture, that the assembly could scarce be prevailed upon 
to listen to his opponent, an old man of unpretending appear- 
ance. But when he obtained audience, he said in a few words, 
' All that this young man can talk of, I have cloned The deci- 
sion was unanimously in favor of experience against theory. 
This resembles," says he, and so say I, "this resembles exactly 
the question now tried before us. 

" Here stands Theory, a scroll in her hand, full of deep and 
mysterious comibi nations of figures, the least failure in any one 
of which may alter the result entirely, and which you must take 
on trust, for who is capable to go through and check them ? 
There lies before you a practical system, successful for upwards 
of a century. The one allures you with promises, as the saying 
goes, of untold gold ; the other appeals to the miracles already 
wrought in your behalf. The one shows you provinces, the 
wealth of which has been tripled under her management ; the 
other a problem which has never been practically solved. Here 
you have a pamphlet — there, a fishing town — here, the long 
continued prosperity of a whole nation — and there the opinion 
of a professor of economics, that in such circumstances she ought 
not, by true principles, to have prospered at all. In short, good 
countrymen, if you are determined, like vEsop's dog, to snap at 
the shadow and lose the substance, you had never such a gratui- 
tous opportunity of exchanging food and wealth for moonshine 
in the water." 

This, I repeat, Mr. Chairman, exactly resembles the case now 
tried before the country. The temple of public credit, so long 
the ornament, the pride, the defence of the Republic, lies pros- 
trate and in ruins. Its corner-stone has been struck out ; its 
arches have crumbled ; its walls are in fragments at our feet. 
And the architects are now contending before the people, who 
shall be employed to build it up. Shall it be those who allure 
us with promises of untold gold, or those who appeal to miracles 



THE SUC-TREASURY SYSTEM. 259 

already wrought iii our behalf? Shall it be those who show us 
States whose wealth has been tripled under their management, 
or those who point us to a problem never practically solved ? 
Shall it be the architects of a system which has produced the 
long-continued prosperity of a whole nation, or shall it be the 
architects of nothing but the ruins which are now around us ? 
This, Sir, is the exact question. And let it only be fairly put to 
the people, and I believe their decision will be unanimously in 
favor of Experience, and against Theory. 

But, says the gentleman from Gloucester, the old system was 
unconstitutional. The framers of the Constitution were hard 
money men, — so said Daniel Webster. And there is not, and 
never was, any power under the instrument which they adopted 
to create a national bank. An attempt was made to insert such 
a power, but the attempt failed, and consequently the power 
does not exist. 

A few words only, Mr. Chairman, upon this very plausible 
argument. The framers of the constitution were hard money 
men. So says Daniel Webster, and so says everybody else who 
knows any thing of their history. In every legitimate sense 
of that term, they were hard money men — but not in the 
spurious sense which has been lately attached to it. The 
framers of the Constitution had experienced the whole horrors 
of irredeemable paper. That paper had been, indeed, one of the 
main and most indispensable instruments in achieving their 
independence. But so had war and bloodshed, the sword and 
the bayonet. They had now had enough of them all, and were 
resolved to get rid of them all together. But all were by no 
means equally within control. A strip of parchment with a few 
official seals and signatures could put an end to the war and the 
bloodshed, and it had already done so. A simple word of com- 
mand could sheathe the sword and unfix the bayonet, and it had 
already done so. But no treaty and no authority could strike 
out of existence the millions of irredeemable paper, which were 
in every man's pocket, and in every channel of circulation. 
To this evil they were therefore compelled much longer to sub- 
mit. Long after the excitement of war and the holy rage of a 
struggle for liberty had subsided, this medium of frauds and 



260 THE SL'B-TREASURY SYSTEM. 

abominations, to which nothing but that excitement and that 
rase could ever have reconciled them, remained to poison the 
joys of their triumph. No doubt, then, the framers of the Con- 
stitution abhorred irredeemable paper, and in that sense, were 
emphatically hard money men. But in no other or stricter sense 
were they so, and Daniel Webster never said they were. 

Why, Sir, do gentlemen forget that our fathers themselves 
framed a bank charter, before they framed the Constitution? 
And not only so, but it is rather a curious coincidence, in this 
relation, that the same pen, or, certainly, the same hand, which 
gave the last shaping strokes and finishing touches to the Con- 
stitution, had a few years previously been employed in making 
the first plan and original outline of this bank I " That instru- 
ment (the Constitution) was written by the fingers which write 
this letter," said Gouverneur Morris in a letter to Timothy Pick- 
ering. " The first bank in this country was planned by your 
humble servant," wrote the same gentleman to Mr. Moss Kent. 
I refer, I need not say, to the Bank of North America. It was 
incorporated in 1781 by the Congress of the Confederation. On 
the application of its President and Directors, the Assembly of 
Pennsylvania gave it a supplementary charter, in 1782. In 1785, 
a proposition was brought into that Assembly, precisely parallel 
to that which has recently agitated the Convention of the same 
State, to abolish this charter. Upon this occasion, Mr. Morris 
came to its defence, and wrote an address to the Assembly, going 
over the whole ground both of contract and of convenience, of 
justice and of policy. Upon the latter division of the subject 
he dwelt at great length, examining all the objections which had 
been raised against the Institution in question. And what were 
those objections? The same, the same precisely in substance, 
and many of them almost the same in phraseology, which have 
been resounding and echoing over the country for the last six 
years. Let me prove this by stating them. 

These objections, said Mr. Morris, are: — 

" First, that it enables men to trade to their utter ruin by giv- 
ing them the temporary use of money and credit. 

" Secondly, that the punctuality required at the banks throws 
honest men into the hands of usurers. 



THE SUB-TREASURY SYSTEM. 2G1 

" Thirdly, that the great dividend on bank stock induces 
moneyed men to buy stock rather than lend on interest. 

" Fourthly, that rich foreigners Avill, for the same reason, be- 
come stockholders, so as that all the property will finally vest in 
them. 

" Fifthly, that the payments of dividends to foreigners will be 
a constant drain of specie from the country. 

" Sixthly, that the bank facilitates the exportation of coin. 

" Seventhly, that it injures the circulation of bills of credit. 

" Eighthly, that the wealth and influence of the bank may 
become dangerous to the government. 

" Ninthly, that the directors can obtain unfair advantages in 
trade for themselves and their friends. 

"And tenthly, that it is destructive of that equality which 
ought to take place in a free country." 

These, Sir, are the objections to a national bank wdiich were 
agitating the public mind less than two years before the Con- 
vention assembled by which the Constitution of the United 
States was framed, — and these are the objections against which, 
one, at least, of the principal framers of that Constitution was 
foremost in defending such a bank. I might go on to show that 
others of them were associated with him, either directly or indi- 
rectly, in its defence. But I have said enough to prove that, 
though the framers of the Constitution were hard money men 
and abhorred irredeemable paper, they were by no means igno- 
rant of the nature or insensible to the advantages of banking 
institutions, or of convertible paper, but that at the very moment 
when they entered into the Convention of '87, they must all have 
been fresh in the remembrance, and some of them in the experi- 
ence also, of a controversy, in which all the benefits and all the 
dangers of such institutions and of their issues had been con- 
sidered and discussed, and in which the former had been decided 
altogether to preponderate over the latter. 

But the gentleman next reminds us that a proposition was 
made in this very Convention, to give Congress the power to 
charter a bank, and was rejected. The fact is not precisely soj 
Sir. Or at any rate there is no evidence of any such proposi- 
tion on the records of the Convention. As far as any document 



2G2 THE SUB-TREASURY SYSTEM. 

exists, the proposition which was made and rejected, related only 
to incorporating canal companies. The evidence that the motion 
was amended so as to include banks, and finally all other cor- 
porations, is entirely traditionary. And the grounds on which 
the proposition, whatever it was, was rejected, have been widely 
differed about by those having equal opportunities to know them. 
Some have allirmed that it was rejected from an unwillingness 
to confer such a power at all, and others that it was because the 
power being impUed as to all affairs over which a sovereign au- 
thority had been granted, it was unnecessary to specify it in any 
case more particularly. It is plain, Mr. Chairman, that no reli- 
able inference can be drawn from a fact so loosely authenticated, 
and no inference, especially, so contradictory to the whole tenor of 
other well-attested and notorious facts which certainly occurred 
almost immediately afterwards. Has the gentleman from Glou- 
cester never read that in both branches of the first Congress 
under the new Constitution, — and during the first session of 
that first Congress, I believe, — one amendment among many 
that were offered to the Constitution, to be subsequently ratified 
by the people, was this, — " That Congress erect no company of 
merchants with exclusive advantages of commerce" — and that 
this proposition, too, was rejected? Is not this well-authenti- 
cated fact. Sir, a pretty satisfactory set-off to the more doubt- 
ful one on which the gentleman has relied ? Certainly, it seems 
so to me. 

But what did this same first Congress do, at a subsequent 
session ? They incorporated a National Bank. Hamilton drew 
the plan. Was not he a framer of the Constitution ? VVash- 
inffton signed the charter. Was not he a framer of the Consti- 
tution ? 

It has been suggested that Washington's assent to this act 
was slowly and hesitatingly given, and that a veto-message was 
actually prepared for him. This veto-message, again. Sir, rests 
on mere hearsay evidence. But even were it extant among his 
papers, as it certainly would have been had he attached to it the 
slightest value or importance, what would it prove, so long as it 
was not signed, but what we all knew before — the untiring 
activity and exceeding confidence of his anti-bank advisers? 



THE SUB-TREASURY SYSTEM. 2G3 

And as to the slow and hesitating assent which he gave to this 
measure, Washington never gave a quick or hasty assent to any- 
thing. It was not his nature to do so. His reason and not his 
humor, his conscientious and well-considered judgment, and not 
any rash and arbitrary will, were the rules and standards of his 
action. It was by this very slowness and hesitation, that he 
secured the success of our Revolutionary contest. American 
Independence could have been achieved by no other qualities in 
the leader of its armies. 

Unus cunctando nobis restituit rem. 

And so far from regarding the hesitation which characterized 
his course as to this national bank as favorable to the cause of 
those who have suggested it, the whole weight which the sug- 
gestion possesses, whatever it is, seems clearly to belong to the 
other scale. Why, Sir, does it make an opinion less worthy of 
confidence, that it was slowly and deliberately formed? Does it 
diminish the value of a decision, that it was pronounced after 
a full hearing and upon solemn judgment ? Does it impair the 
efficacy of seals and signatures, that they were affixed after 
many misgivings and with much ceremony ? The very reverse 
of all this, certainly, — and especially where the opinion was 
formed, the decision pronounced, the signature and seal affixed 
by a man like Washington. He was not the person to strike 
nice balances in accounts of conscience or of duty. He was 
no constitutional casuist. Much less would he ever have given 
his pen to one side of a question, while his opinion was on the 
other. When he doubted, he sought sincerely and anxiously to 
resolve his doubts, and he rarely acted till they were resolved. 
He svimmoned councils, he solicited opinions, he insisted on the 
fullest and freest statements and arguments of the case on both 
sides, and upon the materials thus obtained he turned and fast- 
ened the calm, clear, dispassionate eye of his own powerful judg- 
ment. And then, like the mists before the sun, those doubts were 
dispelled. And let me add, that he who goes behind the approv- 
ing signature of Washington, to magnify scruples, hesitations, 
or doubts which were expressed or implied by him before that 



2G4 THE SUB-TREASURY SYSTEM. 

signature was given, does great injustice either to his ability or 
his integrity. 

But the charter which he signed was suffered to expire, and 
after a few years a second charter was signed by James Madi- 
son. Was not he a framer of the Constitution ? Was there 
any one among those framers more distinguished, any one whose 
opinion as to what the Constitution was or was intended to be, 
upon this or any other point, we should rather have had? True, 
Mr. Madison had originally opposed this measure. True, he 
had himself once vetoed a national bank charter. And the 
grounds upon which that veto was based are certainly not a 
little remarkable, when considered in connection with the pres- 
ent doctrines of the Government and the present condition of 
the country. They were these. Sir, — that the amount of stock 
to be subscribed would not be sufficient to produce, in favor of 
the public credit, any considerable or lasting elevation of the 
market price ; that no adequate advantage would arise to the 
public credit from the subscription of Treasury notes ; that the 
bank would be free from all obligations to cooperate with public 
measures ; and that the bank would commence and conduct 
its operations under a perpetual obligation to pay its notes in 
specie! Not a word here about divorces between Bank and 
State, but objections rather that the alliance between them was 
not made closer. Not a word about the Government taking 
care of their business and the people of theirs, but a complaint 
that there was not enough of cooperation between Government 
and people to sustain the public credit. And even a suspension 
of specie payments, instead of being denounced as under all 
circumstances, immoral and fraudulent, is regarded as so essen- 
tial, in certain emergencies, to the welfare of the country, that 
it ought to be allowed and authorized in the very terms of the 
charter! 

But what did Mr. Madison say in this same veto message on 
the point of the constitutionality of that charter? He declared 
expressly, Sir, that all question of the constitutional authority of 
Congress to incorporate a bank, was, "in his opinion, precluded 
by repeated recognitions, under varied circumstances, of the 
validity of such an institution, in acts of the legislative, exe- 



THE SUB-TREASURY SYSTEM. 2G5 

cutive, and judicial branches o\ the Government, accompanied 
by indications, in different modes, of a concurrence of the gene- 
ral will of the nation." 

Mr. Chairman, ninc-and-forty years have passed away since 
the foundation of this Republic. During forty of those years a 
national bank has existed. It has received the deliberate sanction 
of many of the framcrs of the Constitution. I know not that 
any one of them has ever perseveringly and consistently opposed 
it. It has received the official signature both of Washington 
and of Madison, and the latter declared more than twenty years 
ago that its constitutionality was even then, in his opinion, no 
longer a matter of question. And yet. Sir, we are now gravely 
told that such an institution is not constitutional, never was 
constitutional, and never will be constitutional, and are soberly 
invited to enter anew upon an abstract original argument upon 
this point. For one, I decline that invitation at once and alto- 
gether. Had I the logical powers of Hamilton and INIarshall 
and Madison and Webster conjoined, and without them one 
could in vain expect to put the subject even in as clear a light 
as that in which it already stands on the pages of these great 
constitutional statesmen, I should regard it as not only a waste- 
ful, but as an unworthy employment of those powers to argue 
such a question. It seems to me too much like arguing the 
constitutionality of the Constitution itself; too much like going 
behind the Constitution to interpret the mysterious terms of some 
original compact or divine right; too much, in short, like open 
and outright nullification. Having confined myself, therefore, 
to a merely historical view of the subject, and being satisfied 
that any one who is not convinced by that would be convinced 
by nothing, I turn to the last topic of my remarks. 

The gentleman from Gloucester has again and again during 
this and other debates, taken occasion to allude to the party 
names of the day, and has more than once summed up his opi- 
nion of their propriety in the elegant exclamation — " American 
Whiggery is British Toryism." He has not indeed been entirely 
and at all times consistent in this cry. The expression, on one 
occasion, that conservatism had grown rife here, — the declara- 
tion, on another, that he was defending the institutions of pro- 

23 



2G6 THE SUB-TREASURY SYSTEM. 

• 

perty from a destructive majority in this House, — and the allu- 
sion, on a third, to the old joke of Dr. Johnson, that the first 
Whio- was the Devil, — have been edifying episodes. But the 
main burthen of his song has still been — " American Whiggery 
is British Toryism." 

If I remember right, Sir, the first time this expression was 
heard in the House, it was used in a relation somewhat personal 
to myself, and therefore it is, that I feel a greater disposition and 
a greater liberty to notice it. It was during a debate on a point 
of order which it was my fortune to be called on to decide soon 
after my election to the Chair, — and in deciding which I referred, 
as an authority, to a similar point which had been decided in 
the British Parliament about five-and-twenty years ago. Upon 
that pohit there was no division in the House of Commons, and 
of course there is nothing upon record to show who was for, or 
who was against, the decision. But the sharp optics of the 
gentleman from Gloucester, seeing things not to be seen, have 
discovered that it was altogether and exclusively the work of a 
Tory majority, and that the Whigs of that assembly were to a 
man opposed to it. And hence, "American Whiggery is Bri- 
tish Toryism." 

Now, Sir, I do not propose to argue that point of order over 
again. Having twice decided it, and twice given my reasons 
at length, and twice been sustained by an overwhelming majority 
of the House, I should have no desire, even were it pertinent to 
the present issue, to enter upon it anew. Let me say, however, 
that it is one thing to follow a Tory precedent in favor of the 
rights of the people and of their title to representation, and a 
very different thing to follow such a precedent when it leads in 
an opposite direction. If the right of a Representative to his 
ote, or rather the right of the people to the vote of their Repre- 
sentatives, were esteemed too precious and too sacred, even in 
the rotten-borough system of the British Parliament five-and- 
twenty years ago, to be set aside upon any indefinite allegation 
of personal interest, how much more should it be held inviolable 
upon such a ground, under the free and equal system which we 
here enjoy I Let me add. Sir, that, whether this be a Tory pre- 
cedent or not, and there is nothing but gratuitous assertion to 



\ 



THE SUB-TREASURY SYSTEM. 2G7 

show what it is, it is the only precedent on the record of Par- 
liamentary proceedings on eitlier side of the ocean; — I should 
rather say that it is the latest of a series of precedents all bear- 
ing upon the same point, and all sustaining the same decision, 
and with whose conspiring authority I have found nothing in 
reason, and nothing upon record, to conflict. But enough, and 
more than enough, of this digression. 

The charge of British Toryism against the American Whigs, 
and the corresponding claim of British Whiggism in behalf of 
American Tories, have not been confined to the circumstances 
of this case or to the principles of this decision. They have 
been applied to the whole political character and conduct of 
both parties, and with particular reference to the great financial 
questions upon which they are now divided. Now it would be 
no difficult undertaking, I am inclined to think. Sir, to prove 
both the charge and the claim, whether in their broader or more 
restricted application, to be utterly unfounded and false. I have 
already alluded to the fact that the joint stock banking system, 
which it is the design of this Sub-Treasury scheme to annihilate, 
has grown up and greatly extended itself under the late liberal 
policy of the British Government. A still greater extension of 
that system has been recently demanded by the British Whigs, 
and some of the more radical of them have even been clamor- 
ing, not for a metallic currency, like the radicals of our own 
land, but for downright irredeemable paper. A free circulation, 
they declare, is the only mode of making trade prosperous and 
wages high, and, though I by no means agree with them in this 
last mode of making the circulation free, their declaration is 
undeniably correct. 

But, ]\Ii-. Chairman, I will not suffer myself to be diverted, 
by the ingenuity of the gentleman from Gloucester, from the 
true issue as to the propriety of these party names. It was no 
hard-money doctrines, it was no financial schemes, that gave rise 
to the renewal of the old Revolutionary titles. No, Sir, but the 
means by which those doctrines were inculcated, and the acts 
by which those schemes have been enforced. It was that series 
of Executive assumptions and usurpations, that succession of ve- 
toes and circulars and orders, to which I have already alluded, — 



2G8 THE SUB-TREASURY SYSTEM. 

and of which, let me add, that had they resulted in the unmin- 
gled prosperity of the country, instead of in its present depress- 
ed and disastrous condition, they would have no less deserved 
the rebuke and condemnation of a free people, — it was these 
arbitrary and tyrannical acts, and the gentleman cannot have 
forgotten it, which called back into political service the old 
appellations of Whig and Tory. And by these measures, and 
not by any abstract opinions upon currency or credit, is the 
propriety of those appellations to be determined. 

But the IMaysville Veto was a self-denying ordinance, the 
gentleman tells us. This is a new name, certainly, for an exer- 
cise of that high kingly prerogative. But it is a good name 
notwithstanding. Sir, and I thank the gentleman for teaching 
me its use. A self-denying ordinance! Where did that phrase- 
ology come from, and what did it originally designate ? The 
self-denying ordinance, IMr. Chairman, was the first of those 
subtle and hypocritical pieces of policy by which Oliver Crom- 
well ultimately obtained the mastery of the British Empire. It 
was an ordinance by which every body was denied but him- 
self, and every will but his own will. And the Maysville Veto, 
too, was the first in that series of vetoes by which the will of 
General Jackson obtained supremacy in this Union, and by 
which the will of the people has been so frequently and fatally 
denied and nullified. Certainly, Sir, it was a self-denying ordi- 
nance. And the veto of Mr. Clay's Land Bill was another. 
And the veto of the INIassachusetts Interest Bill was another. 
And the veto of the Bank Charter was another. And the veto 
of the Bill repealing the Treasury Order was another. Self- 
denying ordinances all. Sir, and worthy of going down to poste- 
rity on the same page with their great original. And a pretty 
ample page they would require. It is a well known fact that 
General Jackson resorted to this self-denying process at least 
twice, and I rather think, three times as often, during his single 
administration, as all our other Presidents together. Indeed, 
this sort of self-denial has been his leading characteristic through 
life, and hence, doubtless, even his private mansion has always 
been denominated the Hermitage ! 

And then, Mr. Chairman, the ways and means by which this 



THE SUB-TREASURY SYSTEM. 269 

self-denial has been manifested! What shifts and subtleties, 
what tricks and contrivances have been left untried, by which 
the just and constitutional responsibility of a veto could be 
evaded or avoided! In some cases, we know, no reasons at all 
have been rendered, but the objectionable bill has been perma- 
nently withheld from the further action of Congress. In other 
instances, the veto message has been sent to a different Con- 
gress from that which passed the bill. And in still another in- 
stance, the bill, instead of being returned to Congress with the 
objections of the President, was sent to the office of the Secre- 
tary of State with the objections of the Attorney- General. And 
then that Veto-Extraordinary and Message-Plenipotentiary — 
the Protest — despatched to the National Senate on the passage 
of a resolution declaring " that in the late Executive proceed- 
ings in relation to the public revenue, the President has assumed 
a power not conferred by the Constitution and laws, but in de- 
rogation of both." That doubtless was a self-denying ordinance 
also ! Its pointed rebuke and proscription of the four members 
who held their seats, as much more than four of the administra- 
tion members of the Senate now hold theirs, in opposition to 
the latest declaration of the will of their constituents, — where 
will a precedent be found for that proceeding since Charles the 
First complained to the House of Commons of John Hampden 
and the rest, or, certainly, since Cromwell himself gave leave of 
absence to an uncomplying Parliament ? Its extraordinary de- 
claration that the President himself was the only direct repre- 
sentative of the American people, — where will a precedent be 
found for such a doctrine as that, since Louis XIV. exclaimed, 
" I am the State ? " Its final and legitimate consummation, by 
which the Journals of the Senate were mutilated, and the ob- 
noxious resolution expunged, — where has there been such a 
prostitution of the public records to the will of an Executive, 
since James the First tore out an offensive vote of the Com- 
mons with his own hand ? 

I repeat, Mr. Chairman, that it was these arbitrary and ty- 
rannical doctrines, these arrogant assumptions of powers not 
granted, these outrageous abuses of powers granted, this con- 
solidation of all departments into one department, and this 

23* 



270 THE SUB-TREASURY SYSTEM. 

subjection of all wills to one will, which revived throughout the 
Union the old Revolutionary designations of political parties. 
And unless the friends of the national administration shall disa- 
vow and denounce these doctrines and these deeds to which I 
have referred, or unless they shall expunge, not one, but all of 
them — not from a mere Legislative Journal only, but from the 
pages of history, and the memory of man, — however they may 
wince and \\Tithe under the odious title which has attached to 
them, they will in vain essay to shake it off. They must stand 
for Tories still. 

Mr. Chairman, I am glad the gentleman from Gloucester has 
seen fit to raise this issue. It has not only given me an oppor- 
tunity to set matters right on this head, but has afforded me an 
opening for giving expression to a sentiment which I have 
deeply felt during the past year, and with which I will conclude 
these remarks. I need hardly say. Sir, that I do not under-esti- 
mate the calamities in which the late crisis has involved the 
country. But great as they have been and still are, as often as 
I have jeviewed the high-handed Executive acts of which I 
have spoken, I have come to this deliberate and solemn conclu- 
sion, — that if the redemption of the country from such usurpa- 
tion and misrule could have been purchased at no other price 
than this crisis and these calamities, it would still have been 
purchased cheap. My honorable friend from Charlestown, (Mr. 
Austin,) remarked the other day that he never would play the 
part of the strong man at Gaza, and pull down the pillars of the 
public prosperity, in order to effect the downfall of his political 
adversaries. I cordially concur with him. Sir, in that patriotic 
sentiment. I would not have produced one jot or tittle of ex- 
isting sufferings for any political effect, nor would I now pro- 
tract them one hour or moment for such a purpose. I hold it 
to be the duty of us all, as citizens and as legislators, to do all 
in our power, without distinction of party, to bring about a res- 
toration of prosperity, and particularly a resumption of pay- 
ments. But looking upon the crisis as a thing already existing, 
and in the production of which I, at least, had no part or agency, 
I say again, that if the political redemption of the country could 
have been procured at no other or lower rate, I would still have 



THE SUB-TREASURY SYSTEM. 27 i 

had it purchased at this rate, and would still have gladly paid 
my full proportion of its price. Sir, I rejoice in the self-vindi- 
cating power of the Constitution, which this crisis has displayed, 
— I repeat it, Mr. Chairman, the self-vindicating power op 
THE Constitution, — for that seems to me the very key and 
index of the whole catastrophe. The first object and operation 
of the Constitution was to revive a prostrate commerce, to re- 
store a fallen credit, to raise up a depreciated and still sinking 
currency. And was it not entirely fit and appropriate that com- 
merce, and currency, and credit, should give signs and warnings, 
when that Constitution was violated and trampled upon, by their 
own depression and downfall ? For myself, I thank my God 
that it has been so. I pray him that the public prosperity may 
never survive the public liberty. I pray him that whenever that 
liberty may be menaced, whenever the Constitution assailed, 
whenever the wide arch of this glorious Republic in danger of 
falling, the people, the whole people, may be roused up to the 
rescue, if in no other way, by their own sufferings and distresses ! 



THE TOTES OF INTERESTED MEMBERS 

A DECISION PROKOTTXCED IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES OF MASSA- 
CHUSETTS, FEBRUARY 19, 1S40. 



A Bill to increase the capital stock of the Boston and Sandwich Glass Company- 
being under consideration, and Mr. Church, of Westport, having moved an amend- 
ment in the following terras : — " The private property of the Corporation, or Stock- 
holders for the time being, and of those who shall be stockholders at the time when 
any debt shall be contracted, shall be holden for the payment of such debt, and may 
be taken therefor on any execution issued against the Corporation for such debt, in the 
same manner as on executions issued against them for individual debts. Any Stock- 
holder who shall pay any debt of the Corporation for which he is made liable, by tliis 
Act, shall have the same remedies for the recovery of the amount so paid, or any 
part thereof, as is provided in the 32d', Sec. of the 38th Chap, of the Eevised Sta- 
tutes ; " and the yeas and nays having been taken on this amendment, Mr. Allen, of 
Northfield called upon the Speaker to disallow the votes of Messrs. Safford and 
Quiney, of Boston, and of Mr. Baker, of Dorchester, as being Stockholders in the 
Corporation, and as being therefore precluded from voting, under the fourteenth rule 
of the 2d chapter of the Kules and Orders, which is as follows : 

" No member shall be permitted to vote, or serve on any Committee, in any ques- 
tion where his private right is immediately concerned, distinct from the public in- 
terest." 

The Speaker decided that those gentlemen did not come within the meaning of the 
rule, and declined excluding them from the count. From this decision Mi-. Allen ap- 
pealed, and thereupon the Speaker stated his reasons as follows : — 

The Speaker said that he had already remarked to the House 
that the point which had been raised by the gentleman from 
Northfield was by no mean.s a new one to him. Dm-ing the 
first session in which he had the honor to occupy the chair of 
the House, he was twice called on to decide it. On both of 
those occasions he spared no pains in examining the authorities 
and precedents on the subject ; on both of them he had the 
satisfaction to arrive at a clear and unhesitating conviction in 



THE VOTES OF INTERESTED MEMBERS. 273 

his own mind; and on both of them, too, he had the still greater 
satisfaction of being sustained by a large majority of the House. 

The first of these cases was that of one or more Bank Di- 
rectors and Stockholders, whom it was proposed to exclude 
from serving on a committee of one from each county, to which 
had been referred a memorial from the Associated Banks, on the 
subject of the suspension of specie payments. The Speaker 
decided that Bank Directors and Stockholders were entitled to 
serve on such a committee under the rule ; and that decision, 
after a long argument in opposition to it by a gentleman not 
now a member, was sustained, 337 to 97. 

The second case was that of sundry Stockholders in the 
Western Railroad Corporation, whom it was proposed to ex- 
clude from voting on the bill for granting the credit of the State 
in aid of the enterprise in which that Corporation were engaged. 
The Speaker decided that those Stockholders were entitled to 
their votes ; and that decision, also, was sustained, 238 to 43. 

These cases differed considerably from each other, and both 
of them, in some degree, from that now under consideration. 
The former related to a whole class of corporations, — the doc- 
trine advanced in opposition to the Chair being, on that occa- 
sion, that no director or stockholder in the one hundred and 
eighteen banks in this Commonwealth could serve on any com- 
mittee, or give any vote on any question, relating to banks and 
banking. The latter related only to a single corporation, and in 
this respect was analogous to the case before the House. It 
was obvious, however, that all three of them involved the same 
general principles, and must be governed by the same parlia- 
mentary precedents. 

There was one point in which the Speaker said he was glad to 
find that all these cases agreed. In neither of them did his deci- 
sion affect results. The committee, on which the bank director 
was permitted to serve, could of course do nothing final. Their 
proceedings, like those of all other committees, w^ere controlled by 
the House. So also in the second case, had all the stockholders 
in the Western Railroad Corporation, who were members of the 
House, been deprived of the right of voting, the aid of the State 
would still have been gi-anted by a handsome majority. And so 



274 THE VOTES OF INTERESTED MEMBERS. 

in the present instance, too, should the three gentlemen who 
have been named as stockholders be exclnded from the count, 
there would remain a majority of thirty-seven to dispose of the 
amendment of the gentleman from Westport. The Speaker 
trusted that these circumstances would insure to the question 
on the present occasion, as they doubtless had in the previous 
instances in which it had been raised, a more calm, deliberate, 
and dispassionate investigation, than if an important issue were 
immediately involved in its settlement. 

Such an investigation he thought it eminently deserved. In 
his judgment it was a question of high importance and of far- 
reaching responsibility. Other corporations were concerned in 
its settlement beside the Sandwich Glass Company; — corpora- 
tions of a different class and character. The real question be- 
fore the House was, whether the city of Boston should be de- 
prived of two of its members legally chosen and duly qualified, 
and the town of Dorchester of one third of its rightful repre- 
sentation here, on an allegation that the private interests of the 
members referred to were inconsistent with a faithful discharge 
of their duty to their constituents ? It was the right of the 
towns and cities, and not of the members themselves, which 
was really at stake in this and in all similar cases. And gentle- 
men would do well to bear in mind, that though the controversy 
might now relate to a city and a town which perhaps could 
afford to spare a vote or two, — it might next be raised in rela- 
tion to such as had but one Representative, and thus disfran- 
chise them altogether on particular questions. 

The Speaker said that as often as he had reflected on this 
view of the case, and it had been again and again the subject 
of his examination, he had been led to doubt both the policy 
and the justice of retaining in our Rules and Orders any such 
principle as that under which the question had been raised. The 
power of the House in all matters relating to their own proceed- 
ings might, perhaps, be unquestionable. The Constitution ex- 
pressly gave them such a power and he supposed it to be abso- 
lute. They might silence members, he presumed, not merely 
in the case provided for, but in any or all other cases, subject 
only to their responsibility to the people. But power was obvi- 



THE VOTES OF INTERESTED MEMBERS. 275 

ously one thing, and right another. And he had often been led 
to question the right by which any portion of the Representa- 
tives of the people could say to any other portion, except where 
it might be absolutely essential to their own self-defence and 
self-preservation as a deliberative, legislative body, that they 
should not exercise the common and acknowledged privileges 
and powers of membership. All were here by similar titles and 
upon similar terms. We were the Representatives of the seve- 
ral communities which had elected us, and our responsibilities 
were to them, and not to each other. And it would seem no 
inappropriate reply, to any one who should attempt to interfere 
with another in the exercise of his duty as a member, and to 
exclude him in any case from his equal share in the collective 
will of the House, upon some allegation of his being disquali- 
fied for the service which his fellow-citizens had assigned him, — 
" Who art thou that judgest another man's servant ? To his 
own master he shall stand or fall." 

The Speaker confessed, therefore, that, as a matter of prin- 
ciple, he was opposed to the rule altogether. But it had come 
down to us from a distant antiquity, and had been annually in- 
corporated into our parliamentary system. It was his duty, ac- 
cordingly, as the servant of the House, to observe and execute 
it. And he should not shrink from doing so, wherever its exe- 
cution was called for. But the same views which had led him 
to question its justice in the abstract, would lead him also, now 
and always, to give it the narrowest possible construction. He 
desired to be personally instrumental in depriving as few of the 
Representatives of the people as might be, of what seemed to 
him their just and rightful prerogative. And he had no hesita- 
tion in repeating what he said on this subject three years ago, 
that he should very much prefer to have any one or any num- 
ber of his decisions set aside by the House, than to be guilty 
himself of setting aside the vote of a single member in a case in 
any degree doubtful. 

Nor did scruples like these seem to have been confined to 
himself. Old as the rule was, and incorporated, as it had been, 
into all our legislative systems, national and State, it seemed to 
have been a very rare occurrence for it to be enforced, or even 



276 THE VOTES OF INTERESTED MEMBERS. 

for any question to be raised under it. With the exception of 
a single case which had recently occurred in Congress, during a 
very exciting discussion, and to which he would presently allude, 
he had no knowledge of any such point having been raised in 
any American Assembly but our own. Doubtless, there must 
have been such instances in some of our State Legislatures, but 
he had never met with any, and knew not where to find any 
account of them. During the long and agitating controversies, 
extending through so many successive years, as to the re-charter 
of the United States Bank, in Congress, although partisan 
jealousies were sharply stimulated against that institution, al- 
though not a few of its stockholders were known to be mem- 
bers, and although accusations of other sorts of interest in its 
continued existence were rife in all quarters, no such point of 
order is believed to have been started. The rule, by general 
consent, seems to have been left to operate upon individual con- 
sciences, inducing members to decline voting of their own ac- 
cord, wherever they felt they were liable to be swayed from the 
discharge of their duties by their private interests, or wherever 
perhaps, they were unwilling to incur the suspicion of being 
thus swayed, — but to have been regarded as altogether too 
odious and too arbitrary to be put forcibly into execution. 

But its execution had been demanded in this case by the gen- 
tlemen from Northfield, and, in default of any American author- 
ities on the subject, the Speaker said he was compelled to resort 
to the Parliamentary Annals of the Mother Country, from which 
the rule was originally borrowed, to find precedents for deter- 
mining its rightful interpretation and legitimate intent. Even 
there the precedents were few and far between ; — but the Chair 
was happy to state, that all which he had been able to find had 
confirmed him in his opinion that the strictest and narrowest 
possible construction was to be given to the rule, which its 
terms would admit of. Even in an unreformed, rotten-borough 
House of Commons, where there was so little pretence to any 
representation of the people on the principle of equality, and 
where so many of the members were without any direct re- 
sponsibility to the peo})le in the true sense of that term, there 
seemed to have been the utmost caution observed in disfranchis- 



THE VOTES OP INTERESTED MEMBERS. 277 

ing a member on any pretence of private interest. How much 
more ought such a caution to be observed in a Legislative As- 
sembly so carefully constituted to insure equality and responsi- 
bility as ours I 

There were but three leading cases in the English Parlia- 
mentary Journals on this subject, so far as the Chair had found 
opportunity to examine them. The first in order was the Loyalty 
Loan case, in 1797. This was a question about allowing an 
outright bonus or gratuity of five pounds in the hundred to the 
subscribers to a loan called the Loyalty Loan, which had been 
made to the British Government in a great public exigency, and 
by which the subscribers had suffered a pecuniary loss. It was 
a measure purely of pecuniary relief and indemnification to pri- 
vate individuals. It was there decided that the interest of the 
subscribers was direct and immediate. It was a vote of money 
directly and immediately out of the public Treasury into their 
own pockets, and the votes of such of them as were members — 
except, indeed, of those who declared in their places that they 
did not intend to avail themselves of the bonus — were accord- 
ingly disallowed. This case, it would be perceived, was pre- 
cisely analogous to the pension case supposed by the Chair, a 
day or two since, when this point of order was first suggested, 
and did not go at all beyond it. 

The second case was that of the London Flour Company, in- 
corporated for the manufacture of bread in the year 1800. By 
that bill certain persons were not merely incorporated for the 
purpose which has been named, but it was provided that they 
should be allowed ten per cent, interest on moneys advanced by 
them for the establishment, instead of five per cent, which was 
the legal rate of interest. In this case it was decided, that sub- 
scribers to the stock might vote on the passage of the bill in all 
its various stages, and upon all questions arising in relation to it,, 
with the single exception of that relating to this provision as to 
the rate of interest which they should be allowed to receive. 
But on a motion to reduce this rate from ten per cent, to five, 
their votes were disallowed. 

The third case was that of the Gold Coin Bill, in 1811, — a 
bill introduced to remedy some of the evils growing out of a 

24 



278 THE VOTES OF INTERESTED MEMBERS. 

suspension of specie payments and a depreciation of paper 
money in England, and in which it was alleged the Bank of 
England was deeply interested. The direct purpose of the bill 
was to prohibit the purchase of gold coins at any price above 
their par value in paper. The immediate intention was to bring 
up the bills of the Bank of England from the state of deprecia- 
tion in which their irredeemability had naturally involved them, 
and to restore them to their full nominal value. On this occasion 
there were no less than forty-five directors and proprietors of 
that institution in the House of Commons, and the votes of all 
of them were allowed, after much debate but without any di- 
vision. 

Of these three cases, the only ones the Speaker had been able 
to find, the second manifestly presented the nearest analogy to 
that now before the House. It was, like this, the case of a Cor- 
poration whose charter was immediately under consideration ; 
and the question there, as here, was how far the stockholders 
could vote upon that charter. It was clear, that if that precedent 
were to be followed, they could vote on the passage of the bill 
from one stage to another, and on its final passage, and on all 
other questions relating to it, except where the question was 
solely and exclusively one as to the amount of their own profits. 
The principle of the case, as repeatedly laid down in the debate 
on the point of order, was, — that where a bill was partly of a 
public nature and partly of benefit to themselves, (and it was 
admitted that that bill was of such a mixed character,) the 
stockholders might vote on the principle ; but that whenever the 
incidental point arose in which their own interests exclusively 
lay, they could not vote. 

This is substantially the rule of this House, by which it is 
provided, that to exclude a member from voting, the interest 
must be a private interest, — or rather " a private right," (a word 
certainly of greater caution, and which unquestionably justified 
a narrower construction than the English rule,) — immediately 
concerned and distinct from the public interest. And now the 
question was, whether the proposition offered by the gentleman 
from Westport involved directly and immediately such a dis- 
tinct private interest of the Stockholders of the Boston and 



THE VOTES OF INTERESTED MEMBERS. 279 

Sandwich Glass CoiTipany, and presented such a question of 
unmixed private right, as to exclude them from voting on it 
under the rule as illustrated by these precedents. 

This inquiry rendered necessary some examination of the pro- 
position itself, and the answer to it would undoubtedly depend 
not a little on the different views which were entertained as to 
the character and consequences of that proposition. Did this 
proposition of unlimited liability present to the House solely 
and singly a consideration of profit or loss to the stockholders ? 
Was it a naked, unmixed matter of private interest or private 
right to the company ? Had the public no concern in the ques- 
tion ? If such were the case, the three gentlemen clearly could 
not vote upon it. But the Chair certainly did not regard it in 
that light. He looked upon the question of limited or unlimited 
liability, whether in reference to all corporations or to one, as a 
question in which the public was deeply interested. He had 
always believed that where there was an unlimited liability, an 
unlimited credit was sure to follow ; that instead of looking to 
the capital only, the public were led to place their trust on some 
indefinite amount of individual wealth behind it ; that unwar- 
ranted confidence was thus certain to be created, while, at the 
same time, those of the stockholders whose liability beyond 
their stock was worth any thing, were not less certain to with- 
draw from the concern ; and that the security of the corpora- 
tion, of its creditors, and of the community generally, were thus 
at once and together put in jeopardy. The tendency of such a 
measure to drive capital out of the State, furnished another 
mode of illustrating the interest of the public in such a propo- 
sition. But, without entering further into his personal opinions 
as to the amendment in question, it was enough for him to say, 
that it had been argued from first to last on the express ground 
of the public interest, the interest of the creditors and the inte- 
rest of the community generally. No one had pretended that it 
was a mere matter of dollars and cents to the stockholders — a 
simple question whether they should receive ten per cent, or five 
per cent, on their money. The very term liability was a relative 
term. Liability to what? Liability to whom ? It was plain, 
and had been all along admitted, that, however there might be 



280 TUE VOTES OF INTERESTED MEMBERS. 

a private interest at stake, it was not presented distinctly from 
the public interest which was concerned also, but was involved 
and mixed up with it. And the precedents expressly asserted 
that where a matter was " of a mixed nature, partly public and 
partly private," stockholders should be allowed to vote. He 
misht go on to observe that there could be no certain evidence 
in the case of an individual stockholder, whether he could have 
any private interest at all in the subject, as this must depend on 
the fact whether he had any property beyond that embarked in 
the concern, upon which this unlimited liability was to rest. If, 
in the case of the Loyalty Loan, the mere declaration of a pur- 
pose not to avail himself of the bonus, could exempt a subscriber 
from the operation of the rule, an absolute inability to receive 
either advantage or detriment from any particular provision, 
would certainly be no less effectual. But the views already taken 
he regarded as sufficient without so great a refinement ; and he 
had only suggested it as an illustration of the extreme care 
which the precedents inculcated in the application of the rule 
in question. 

The Speaker said that the case to which he had alluded as 
having recently occurred in Congress, was that of the New Jer- 
sey members, who were declared by Mr. J. Q. Adams, while in 
the Chair of the House of Representatives, to be entitled to 
vote on a question relating to their own case. The Speaker 
said he had no record of that decision, and referred to it only 
from memory. It was a case, to say the least, as to which he 
should have felt quite as much doubt as about that now under 
consideration. He had been led to think of it, by one in some 
degree analogous, which seemed likely to present itself within a 
few weeks past, in reference to the two members from Mendon, 
whose seats had now been vacated, but who, it was well re- 
membered, voted in every instance on their own case, down to 
the final yeas and nays on the question of declaring their elec- 
tion void. And even on that question they were not prevented 
from voting by the Chair or by the House. Now, some of the 
Parliamentary authorities expressly referred to election cases as 
coming under the usage on the subject of interested members. 
One of the oldest precedents on record on this subject, he be- 



THE VOTES OF INTERESTED MEMBERS. 281 

lieved, was an election case. He was glad, however, that, in 
the Mendon case, no point of order was pressed, and that he 
was relieved from the necessity of choosing between the author- 
ity of President Adams, fortified by his own deliberate private 
judgment, and the precedents of the Parliament from which the 
rule had been borrowed. True, there was this marked distinc- 
tion between the New Jersey members and the Mendon mem- 
bers, — that the former were provided with certificates of un- 
questionable validity, while those of the latter were believed to 
be without some of the requisite sanctions and signatures. But 
not even this would have reconciled him to depriving those gen- 
tlemen of their votes in one case, while the House permitted 
them to retain their seats at all. 

It might be asked of the Speaker, in what cases the rule was 
to be applied, so as not to be altogether inoperative. The case 
of a pension had already been suggested. If a member of the 
House were a petitioner for a pension, bounty, remuneration, or 
indemnification of any kind, the rule would clearly exclude him 
from voting on the question. A large number of resolves had 
already passed the House and others were still in the orders of 
the day, granting gratuities to persons who had arrested crimi- 
nals, detected counterfeiters, or rendered other service to the 
community. If any of these persons had been members of the 
House, their votes must have been disallowed. Then there was 
a class of cases liable at any time to arise out of the conduct 
and character of members, when charges might be made against 
them upon which the House might find it necessary to proceed, 
or when by some gross violation of order and decorum in the 
House, or of morality and honor out of it, they might subject 
themselves to reprimand or expulsion. And questions might 
also, perhaps, occur in relation to corporations, on which the votes 
of the stockholders would be excluded under the precedent of the 
London Flour Company, before cited. But these questions the 
Speaker believed could be very few, and the multiplication of 
them he thought would be attended with danger to the great 
fundamental right of the people to representation on the princi- 
ples of equality. If members duly elected and qualified were to 
be deprived of their votes, as had been demanded, now and for- 

24* 



282 THE VOTES OF INTERESTED MEMBERS. 

merly, on every question relating to corporations in which they 
may be associated with hundreds of other members of the 
community, and in the prosecution of a business which directly 
employs the labor of other hundreds of workmen, and indirectly 
of still other hundreds of agricultural producers, — if such an 
interest in any question as this, must be construed into " a pri- 
vate right distinct from the public interest," subjecting a member 
to a temporary disfranchisement, — the right of the people to an 
equal representation on every subject of legislation, would be 
rendered precarious indeed. If the stockholders of such corpora- 
tions were to be deprived of their votes, how should it be with 
the stockholders of rival corporations or even of individuals en- 
gaged in the same business, whose interests might be adverse, and 
whose policy might be to crush competition, if any such should 
chance to be members ? How should it be with members who 
owned real estate in the vici^iity of the establishment, or with 
farmers who would sell their produce at higher prices owing to 
its neighborhood, or with agents or factors who had the sale of 
its wares and fabrics ? All these might have interests fully equal 
to those of the stockholders. And with what class of corpora- 
tions should the proscription cease? How should it be with 
members of municipal corporations, when questions of particu- 
lar and exclusive interest to those corporations should occur? 
On the questions of boundary between adjacent towns which 
were annually occurring, were the members from both towns to 
be ruled out from voting? If a strict analogy were to be ob- 
served between the proceedings of courts of justice as to jurors 
and witnesses, and the proceedings of this House, such cases as 
these must clearly be comprehended under the rule. 

There were others, too, besides members of corporations, as 
to whose right of voting questions must arise, if the rule were 
to receive such an extension ? How should it be with farmers, 
on the bounties on wheat or silk ? How with innkeepers or 
trrocers, on the regulation of the sale of spirituous liquors ? 
How with the members living in the vicinity of Charles River 
and Warren bridges, on the subject of restoring a toll to those 
decaying structures? The doctrines which two years ago would 
have deprived a stockholder in any bank in the Commonwealth 



THE VOTES OF INTERESTED MEMBERS. 283 

from serving on a committee or voting, in reference to the en- 
tire subject of banks and banking, would seem to justify a simi- 
lar proscription in all these cases. 

But the Speaker said he would no longer trespass on the in- 
dulgence of the House. He was aware that gentlemen might 
at first sight be disposed to construe the rule as the gentleman 
from Northfield had seemed to construe it, in appealing from his 
decision. And therefore, believing it to be a rule of doubtful 
constitutional justice, in derogation of the rights of the mem- 
bers, adverse to the equality of the representative system, and 
which, unless carefully limited, was capable of being wrested to 
the worst of purposes, he had felt bound to give to the House 
his honest views of its character and tendency, and to explain to 
them fully the grounds of his decision. 

His own disposition would be never in any case to apply the 
rule to a case of corporate interest. Corporations had been so 
multiplied of late years, and their interests had become so closely 
interwoven with those of the whole people of the Common- 
wealth, that it was difficult to imagine cases in which they were 
entirely distinct. The interests of individual corporations even, 
partook largely of the character of public interests. To how 
large a number of persons must an interest be common, to be 
entitled to the designation of a public interest? The Western 
Railroad Corporation had some thousands of stockholders. Was 
the interest which a member held in common with thousands of 
others, to be regarded as a private interest? What, then, should 
be the numerical limit at which an interest should cease to be 
private, and be acknowledged as public ? The members whose 
votes were in question in the present case, were interested in 
common with at least a hundred stockholders, and there were 
frequently more than three hundred operatives employed in the 
establishment. The Speaker said that if, in any case, he was 
to be compelled to regard interests like these as grounds of ex- 
clusion under the rule, it would only be where the authority for 
so doing was plain, precise, and unavoidable. He would follow 
in the steps which had been already taken in this line of con- 
struction, as it was his duty to do; but he should adventure 
on no new tracks in a direction so contrary to his opinions of 



284 THE VOTES OP INTERESTED MEMBERS. 

policy and justice. And, if he must err at all, he should always 
endeavor to err on that side, which should insure the greatest 
freedom of voice and vote to those who held their seats in the 
House by the same title with himself, and who had all the con- 
stitutional qualifications for a full, equal, and unrestrained exer- 
cise of the privileges of membership. 

The decision of the Speaker was sustained, 259 to 189. 



EEPLY TO A YOTE OF THANKS. 



AX ACKNOWLEDGMENT OF A VOTE OP THANKS TO THE SPEAKER, PASSED 

BY THE HOUSE OP REPRESENTATIVES OF MASSACHUSETTS, MARCH 

21, 1840. 



Gentlemen of the House op Representatives, — 

I NEED not assure you of the sincere pleasure with which I 
rise to respond to the Resolution you have just adopted. I thank 
the gentleman from Westport for proposing it. I thank each 
member of the House for uniting in its passage. Called, as I 
was, at the commencement of the session, by so mere a major- 
ity of the members present, to preside over a body so nearly 
balanced in reference to the all-absorbing subject of party poli- 
tics, I entered on the duties assigned me with little hope of 
giving satisfaction, either to myself or others. I looked forward 
to labors, of which other years had afforded me no experience. 
I anticipated trials, for which previous sessions had furnished 
me with no adequate preparation. And, certainly, I ventured 
to promise myself, at the end, nothing more, at the best, than 
the indulgent consideration of that bare majority by whose 
unmerited favor I had been placed here. 

It could not fail to give me the highest gratification, Gentle- 
men, to find, as the session advanced, so many of my apprehen- 
sions disappointed; to find the elements of strife and discord, 
which manifestly abounded in the original composition of this 
body, so rarely set in motion ; to find the public business so 
little interrupted by acrimonious controversy and angry dispute ; 
and, more especially, to find my own oflficial services, so seldom 
made the subject of party division, or even of personal exception. 

Gentlemen, I have not sat here during three successive winters 



286 REPLY TO A VOTE OF THANKS. 

without learning, that it is always in the power of parties, or 
even of individuals, to perplex and embarrass a presiding officer 
in the performance of his duties, if they have the disposition to 
do so. Let him be ever so able, by frequent appeals from his 
decisions they may cast a doubt upon his competency. Let 
him be ever so scrupulous, by repeated insinuations and impu- 
tations upon his motives, they may raise a suspicion as to his 
integrity. Let him be ever so prompt, so patient, so untiring, 
by constantly cavilling at his course, they may render his posi- 
tion painful to himself, and involve his administration in more 
or less of popular odium. No length of experience, no degree of 
diligence, no measure of fidelity, I am persuaded, can arm a 
Speaker effectually against the persevering assaults of personal 
malice or partisan malignity. While, on the contrary, in order 
to render his exertions, in any considerable degree, successful or 
satisfactory, he must have the confidence of those over whom 
he presides, and requires a constant exercise of their indulgence, 
forbearance, and generosity. 

It is to such an exercise of generosity, indulgence, and for- 
bearance on your part. Gentlemen, and to the confidence in my 
official fidelity you have habitually manifested, that I feel myself 
indebted for whatever success may have attended my efforts 
during the present winter. Those efforts, I may be pardoned 
for saying, have been honest, have been arduous, have been 
unremitted. But I am sensible they must have utterly failed of 
their object, had they not been seconded and sustained by your 
confidence and your cooperation. For these, then, even more 
than for the complimentary tribute you have just been pleased 
to pay me, I desire to express to you my warmest acknowledg- 
ments, and to tender you the assurances of my heartfelt grati- 
tude. 

And now, Gentlemen, I cannot resume my seat without con- 
gratulating you on the comparatively early period at which 
we have succeeded in bringing our labors to a close. The 
session of 1838, the first in which I had the honor to occupy the 
Chair of the House, did not reach its termination, as some of 
you may remember, until the 25th day of April. It was, of 
course, considered a matter for general felicitation last year, that 



REPLY TO A VOTE OF THANKS. 287 

an adjournment was effected as early as the 10th day of the 
same month. But we have now the satisfaction of having 
accomplished a far greater reduction in the length of the legis- 
lative term, and of having despatched the business of the Com- 
monwealth in a shorter time than any of our predecessors since 
the June session was abolished. Sitting here as we do, at an 
expense of not less than twelve or thirteen hundred dollars a 
day, all the departments of government included, it is no insig- 
nificant affair, in an economical point of view, if in no other, to 
cut off thirty or forty days from the duration of the session. 
And should the example which has thus been given, be imitated 
and improved upon for a few years to come, as I firmly believe 
it easily may be without any detriment to the public interests, 
the treasury of the Commonwealth will soon be relieved of a 
large part of the burden which has borne on it most oppressively 
for many years past. 

Nor is it only to an abbreviation of the session that we may 
look for the accomplishment of this most desirable result. If the 
amendment to the Constitution, which was proposed by the last 
Legislature and ratified by the present by such large majorities 
in both branches, should be adopted by the people on the first 
Monday of April next, as I heartily hope it will be, the number 
of members in this branch of the Legislature, as you are all 
aware, will be diminished by more than one hundred and fifty, 
and the daily expenses of the sessions be proportionably reduced. 

But, Gentlemen, I will not trespass further on your attention 
with any dry economical calculations, nor will I detain you with 
any detailed review of the measures in which we have been 
engaged. Perhaps the most striking characteristic of the session 
which is now about to terminate, has been the almost entire 
omission of any thing like long speeches, and I will not now 
deviate from a policy which has proved so propitious to an early 
completion of our duties. Let me only say, in conclusion, that 
if, in the exercise of authority and the enforcement of order, I 
have infringed on a single privilege or injured a single feeling, 
I sincerely regret it, and that every member of the House will 
carry with him, when we part, my best wishes for his personal 
health and happiness. May that God who has guarded you all 



288 REPLY TO A VOTE OF THANKS. 

liere — preserving you from the pestilence which has walked 
among us in darkness, and the sickness that has destroyed at 
noon-day, and to whose mercy we owe it, that disease and 
death have not obeyed the summons which seems almost to 
have been served upon them in behalf of us all, through the me- 
dium of this thick and poisonous air which we have been daily 
inhalino- — may He now guide you in safety to your homes. 
May each one of you enjoy a rich portion of the benefits and 
blessincfs of those free institutions which you have been called 
on to administer, and of those equal laws which you have here 
assisted in enacting. And may you find an ample reward for 
the exertions you have made and the services you have rendered, 
in ihe approbation of your constituents, in the welfare of the 
whole people, and in the long-continued prosperity and^ honor 
of our beloved Commonwealth. 



THE PEOCEEDS OF THE PUBLIC LANDS. 

A SPEECH DELIVERED IN THE HOUSE OP REPRESENTATIVES OF THE UNI- 
TED STATES, IN COMMITTEE OF THE AVHOLE ON THE STATE OF THE 
UNION, JULY 2, 181L 



I HAVE no design, Mr. Chairman, of trespassing at any great 
length on the time of the Committee. The sin of making a long 
speech is one which I have never yet committed in this hall, and I 
certainly shall not suffer myself to be guilty of it at the present 
session. If I had succeeded in obtaining the floor immediately 
after the honorable member from South Carolina (JMr. Pickens) 
had concluded, and before he had left the House, I might have 
indulged in some comments on one or two parts of his speech. 
I hardly regret, however, that I failed to do so, as it is quite 
too warm weather to follow that gentleman far, either in his 
gloomy forebodings or his eloquent flights. One question which 
he has propounded, T would not, under any circumstances, have 
attempted to answer. The gentleman asked, emphatically, 
" What constitute State rights ? " Sir, the true rights of the 
States are not difficult to be ascertained, and are the same yes- 
terday, to-day, and always. But " State rights," in the parti- 
san sense of the term, seem to me to be one thing to-day, 
another thing to-morrow, and sometimes nothing at all the next 
day. At any rate, I have never met with a definition which 
could stand the test of time and circumstances. 

It is not to be disguised, that, at first sight certainly, there are 
some difficulties about adopting the measure under considera- 
tion, at the present moment, even on the part of those who, 
under other circumstances, would be disposed to support it. 

25 



290 THE PROCEEDS OF THE PUBLIC LANDS. 

We have been informed by the Secretary of the Treasury, that 
there is an aggregate of debt and deficit to be provided for in 
this and the ensuing year of more than twelve millions of dol- 
lars. A bill has already been reported, authorizing a public loan 
to that amount. Another bill may soon be expected to lay new 
duties on imports, for the purpose of meeting this debt when it 
shall fall due, and, in the mean time, of supplying the defi- 
ciency in the annual revenue. These bills will form a conspi- 
cuous part of the legislation of the present session. They will 
occupy a prominent place on the statute book of the present 
Congress. And it cannot be denied, that it would look a little 
strange to find in immediate juxtaposition with them, perhaps 
on the very next page, a bill granting away, by an outright and 
absolute donation, the funds which are already on hand, or those 
which are certain to come into our possession, during such a 
period of the national necessity. 

Yet, strange as such a course of legislation may appear, and 
much as I foresee it will be harped on, for the purpose of excit- 
ing hostility towards those who may have assented to it, I intend 
to give it my vote. I am desirous, therefore, of vindicating that 
vote, as well as I can, in advance. I wish, in other words, in 
the few remarks with which I shall trouble the Committee this 
morning, to take my stand, where so many other gentlemen who 
have opposed the bill have taken theirs, at the very doors of the 
Treasury, and with its deplorable condition of emptiness and 
exhaustion full in my view, — a condition, let me say, which we 
Sir, had no hand in creating, — to justify, as far as I am able, my 
assent to an act, by which we shall seem to be literally " taking 
away from that which has not, even that which it has." 

For the purpose of this justification, it seems to me essential 
to maintain, in the first place, that the moneys which are to be 
distributed by this bill are held by the national government in 
some different right, and upon some different conditions, from 
those which we are about to collect. In other words, it is neces- 
sary to establish a broad and clear distinction, so far as the con- 
stitutional powers and duties of Congress are concerned, between 
the proceeds of the public lands and the annual receipts from 
other sources of revenue. 



THE PROCEEDS OF THE PUBLIC LANDS. 291 

For one, certainly, I could never give my support to this bill, 
unless I were convinced that such a distinction exists. I could 
never vote to tax with a view to distribution. If, indeed, such 
a surplus were again accumulated in the Treasury as we saw 
there a few years ago, I might be willing to get rid of it in the 
best way I could, from whatever source it might have been col- 
lected ; but to impose taxes with one hand, and distribute them 
with the other, would, in my judgment, be utterly unjustifiable, 
as well as grossly unconstitutional. 

Does, then, such a distinction exist? Do the proceeds of the 
public lands come into the Treasury under such different circum- 
stances from its ordinary receipts, as to constitute in some sort 
a special fund ? 

Gentlemen on the other side say, no. They maintain that 
when the lands have once been turned into moneys, and those 
moneys have been placed in the Treasury, they are in no degree 
distinguishable from the ordinary revenues of the country. 
And so entirely do they confound the two classes of receipts, as 
to tell us that, if Congress should pass this distribution bill, all 
the salutary safeguards thrown around the taxing power by our 
fathers would be broken down ! This was the language of the 
honorable member from Maine, (Mr. Clifford.) 

Now, what under the sun have the proceeds of the public 
lands to do with the taxing power ? Is it a tax, to give a man 
an acre of the best land on the face of the earth for a dollar and 
a quarter, and that at his own particular demand ? If it be. Sir, 
it is a tax which the people of this country may well be content 
to bear. Commend me to such taxes. I desire no safeguards 
against them. I am willing to submit to such taxation as this, 
even without representation. 

Mr. Chairman, it seems to me that the most cursory examina- 
tion of the Constitution is sufficient to show that there is no 
analogy whatever between these different classes of revenue. 
The power to lay taxes is a power, as we all know, created by 
the Constitution itself. No such power existed before the Con- 
stitution was established. And the exercise of the power is 
limited by the express letter of the Constitution to certain spe- 
cified purposes. 



292 THE PROCEEDS OF THE PUBLIC LANDS. 

" The Congress shall have power (says the Constitution) to lay 
and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts 
and provide for the common defence and general welfare of the 
United States;" — language, certainly, pretty broad and compre- 
hensive in itself, but which has received a construction limiting 
it to the objects for which Congress, in other parts of the Con- 
stitution, is empovv^ered to provide. 

But how is it as to the public lands ? The power of Congress 
over those lands was not originally created by the Constitution. 
A large portion of those lands was ceded to the General Govern- 
ment prior to the adoption of that instrument. Another portion 
was ceded soon after its adoption. And a third and fourth por- 
tion were purchased at subsequent and separate periods. The 
Constitution was framed with little or no reference to the lands. 
In the original draft of that instrument, there was not a line, or 
a word, or a syllable, in allusion to them. And the only provi- 
sion which was afterwards inserted by the Convention, or which 
can be found in relation to them now, is as follows, — 

" The Congress shall have power to dispose of and make all needful rules and regu- 
lations respecting the territory or other property belonging to the United States ; and 
nothing in this Constitution shall be so construed as to prejudice any claims of the 
United States, or of any particular State." 

And now, what is there, Mr. Chairman, in this provision which 
makes it incumbent on Congress to appropriate the proceeds of 
these lands to one purpose rather than to another ? What lan- 
guage is there in this clause, or what construction of any lan- 
guage, which gives us the authority to place them in the Treasury 
for the ordinary expenditures of the government, which does not 
equally give us the authority to distribute them among the 
States ? Where do we get the power to dispose of the proceeds 
at all, except as a necessary implication from the power to dis- 
pose of the lands ? Sir, I put to the Committee this dilemma, — 
if the power to dispose of the lands does not carry with it the 
power to dispose of the proceeds, we have no such power ; and 
if it does, then the latter power is coequal and coextensive with 
the former. And is there any one who sets limits to the power 
of disposing of the lands ? It is too late to do so. We have 



THE PROCEEDS OF THE PUBLIC LANDS. 293 

already appropriated them to almost every object that can be 
named, — to education, to internal improvements, to charity, to 
the use of individuals, of corporations, and of States. 

And there is as little, Mr. Chairman, in the reason of the thing 
as there is in the language of the Constitution, for limiting the 
disposition of the moneys received from the sales of the public 
lands. The people may well be jealous of intrusting even their 
own representatives with the power of taxing them for every 
purpose at their pleasure. But, as I have already said, the sales 
of the public lands involve no taxation ; they impose no burdens 
upon anybody. In regard to them, therefore, the people are en- 
tirely safe in giving us the full latitude of a sound and reason- 
able discretion. And such a discretion, I hold, they have given us. 

But gentlemen tell us that inasmuch as the distribution of the 
proceeds of the public lands will involve the necessity of laying 
additional taxes on imports, it amounts to the same thing as 
distributing the receipts from taxation. Why, Sir, the same 
reasoning might almost as well be adduced against appropriating 
the Smithsonian fund to the object for which it was designed. 
That fund, if applied to the ordinary expenditures of the go- 
vernment, would save the necessity of raising an equal amount 
by taxation. And its appropriation to the diffusion of useful 
knowledge among mankind, according to the terms of the be- 
quest, might, with almost as much justice, be complained of as 
involving the necessity of imposing additional burdens on the 
people, as the distribution for which this bill provides ; if, as I 
maintain, the proceeds of the public lands constitute a separate 
fund in the Treasury, entirely distinguishable from the ordinary 
revenues of the country. 

Again, Sir, it has been suggested that, upon this principle, the 
national government might do to almost any extent indirectly, 
that which it is admitted they have no power to do directly. 
They might tax the people, we are told, to almost any amount 
for the purchase of new lands, and then go on to sell them forth- 
with and distribute the proceeds. But it is to be observed, Mr. 
Chairman, in the first place, that such an abuse would have its 
origin in the power to purchase, and not in the power to distri- 
bute. x\nd the power to purchase new territory, we all know, 



15* 



294 THE PROCEEDS OF THE PUBLIC LANDS. 

is one of very questionable constitutionality. The honorable 
member from Pennsylvania (Mr. IngersoU) the other day alluded 
to my respected colleague in front of me, (Mr. Adams,) as hav- 
ing denied the constitutionality of the Louisiana purchase. 
My colleague was not alone in that denial. Mr. Jefferson him- 
self, in a letter to Mr. Breckenridge, written at the time, expressly 
declared that the Executive, in making that purchase, " had done 
an act beyond the Constitution." 

But even were it not so, — even were the power of purchasing 
territory entirely indisputable and unlimited, what would this 
suggestion amount to, but to one of those arguments against 
the use or existence of a power from its liability to abuse, which 
may be brought alike against any and every branch of authority 
which the Constitution bestows ? Sir, if such arguments are 
to have weight, we must revoke all authority, renounce all 
government, abandon all society. Every power may be abused, 
and the only check or safeguard we can have is in the responsi- 
bility of those to whom power is intrusted. 

I hold, therefore, Mr. Chairman, that there is a plain and pal- 
pable distinction between the proceeds of the public lands and 
the other receipts into the Treasury of the nation, and that while 
the latter are limited to certain specified objects of appropriation, 
the former are placed freely, so far at least as the Constitution is 
concerned, at the discretion of Congress, — a discretion only 
controlled by the responsibility of those who exercise it to the 
people who elected them. 

And, indeed, this doctrine has too often been admitted, as- 
serted, and acted upon, even by those who have been the most 
strenuous opponents of this measure of distribution, to require 
any more extended illustration. It was expressly asserted by 
General Jackson, as long ago as 1832. In his Annual Message 
of that year, he says, — 

"As the lands may now be considered as relieved from this pledge (tlie payment of 
the public debt,) the object for wliicli they were ceded liaving been accomplished, it is 
in the discretion of Congress to dispose of them iu such way as best to conduce to the 
quiet, harmony, and general interest of the American people." 

The same doctrine has been admitted, or certainly implied, 



THE PROCEEDS OF THE PUBLIC LANDS. 295 

by all the friends of cession, as it is called, whether absolute or 
conditional, from that day to this. For on what principle could 
Congress cede away the whole or any part of the lands them- 
selves, which does not imply a high and plenary discretion on 
their part to dispose of the proceeds also ? 

I turn, then, Mr. Chairman, from this first point in my argu- 
ment, to inquire what considerations should influence us in the 
exercise of this discretion, and, more especially, what consider- 
ations will justify us in the particular exercise of it which is now 
proposed. 

And, first, I maintain that Congress is not bound in such a 
case to look altogether to the necessities of the National Trea- 
sury. This would be to destroy the whole effect of the distinc- 
tion just established, and practically to place the proceeds of the 
public lands on the same footing with any other description of 
income. We may take a larger and more liberal view of things. 
We may look, and we ought to look, to considerations of equity, 
to considerations of expediency, to considerations commensurate 
with the whole country, or, as General Jackson said, with " the 
quiet, harmony, and general interest of the American people." 

Why, Sir, even in relation to the ordinary revenues of the 
country, the wants of the government are not always exclusively 
regarded. What would be the conduct of Congress at the pre- 
sent session in relation to what is called the compromise act, if 
the necessities of the nation w^ere to be the only rule of action ? 
Under the provisions of that act, five millions of dollars are to 
be withdrawn from the annual revenues of the country, at a 
moment when, as I have said, there is already a debt and defi- 
ciency of twelve millions. We are about to give a silent assent, 
by leaving that act in operation and laying new duties at the 
same time, to a course of proceeding by no means remotely 
analogous, and to my mind, quite as objectionable, abstractly 
considered, as that now under discussion. We are about to 
remit duties with one hand, while we collect them with the other. 
Upon what principle will this be done ? Why, upon the princi- 
ple of a previous compact, an existing understanding, or a high 
and eminent expediency. For myself, I take leave to say, I 
admit no compact. Those whom I have the honor to represent 



296 THE PROCEEDS OF THE PUBLIC LANDS. 

were not parties to any compact. Nor can I regard it as emi- 
nently expedient, either, to pursue such a course. On the con- 
trary, I am disposed to think that, as an abstract question of 
policy and statesmanship, the best way of supplying the exist- 
ing deficiency in the Treasury would be to suspend the operation 
of the compromise act, and lay duties on a few only of the 
leading articles of import, instead of deranging the operations 
of the whole business community by a sudden imposition of 
twenty per cent, ad valorem on every article of commerce which 
is now free, and that as a temporary expedient. But this I well 
know is out of the question. I allude to the subject only for 
illustration. The act will be carried out. Duties to the amount 
of five millions will be taken off, and new duties to the amount 
of twelve millions will be imposed. And this will be done, as 
I have said, on some grounds of compact, understanding, or 
expediency. 

Well, Sir, and are there no such grounds for the measure we 
are now discussing ? Is there no compact in the case, no expedi- 
ency, no equity ? 

I will not go into an elaborate history of the public lands of 
the United States to show my understanding of the terms on 
which the original cession of a large portion of them was made 
by the States. That history is familiar to the House and to the 
country. Those terms have been argued again "and again, not 
only in these halls, but in the halls of every Legislature through- 
out the country. I shall content myself with saying in the most 
general terms, on this head, that, while I cannot go the length 
of declaring, that the appropriation of the proceeds of the pub- 
lic lands to the ordinary purposes of government would be an 
absolute violation of the compact, I have yet no hesitation in 
affirming that, in my humble judgment, a distribution of those 
proceeds among the States would be far more in accordance 
both with the letter and the spirit of that compact. 

I am willing to admit, however, that, as to the intention and 
contemplation of the States at the time these cessions were 
made, I think very little can be safely or certainly argued. The 
contemplation of the States could not have reached to a day 
like this. High as were the hopes, sanguine as were the expecta- 



THE PllOCEEDS OF THE PUBLIC LANDS. 297 

tions, of our fathers at that time, as to the glorious results of the 
liberty they had achieved and the institutions they had esta- 
blished, it never could have entered into their hearts to conceive 
of a condition of the country, in which the public debt being 
all paid off, such countless acres of territory should remain as 
the rich and unencumbered inheritance of their children. These 
cessions certainly were made with no regard to such a state of 
things. They were made with a view to the present, and not 
to the future. They were made to allay the jealousies and settle 
the contentions to which the exclusive claims of certain separate 
States had given rise, and to defray the expenses which their 
common independence had cost. 

The argument in favor of this measure, from the terms of 
cession, however, covers only the lands which were ceded. I am 
aware it is sometimes contended that the lands subsequently 
purchased may be considered as having been purchased with 
the proceeds of those ceded, and may thus be made subject to 
the same principle of disposition. But I prefer, for myself, to 
rely on considerations which are directly and equally applicable 
to the whole domain. 

I come, then, to some explanation of those considerations of 
eminent expediency, which in my judgment, should induce us 
to exercise the discretionary authority we unquestionably possess 
over the proceeds of the public lands in the manner pointed out 
by the bill ; — namely, by distributing them among the States, 
instead of retaining them to eke out the scanty contents of our 
own Treasury. 

And I have no hesitation in saying, Mr. Chairman, that I find 
these considerations exclusively in the situation of some of the 
States of this Union. There is no feature in the condition of 
the country, lamentable as that condition is in so many respects, 
which is calculated to excite such serious apprehension for its 
prosperity and its honor, as the deep indebtedness of so many of 
the States. Sir, we may not assume their debts, directly or 
indirectly. We have no constitutional power to do so. But 
we may do something, and by this bill we should do something, 
to aid, encourage, and sustain them in their efforts to relieve 
themselves. And whatever we can do constitutionally, we are 



298 THE PROCEEDS OF THE PUBLIC LANDS. 

bound to do by every consideration of expediency and of equity, 
of interest and of honor. 

\Yho is there that desires, or is willing if he can help it, to 
see the sovereign States of this Union, or any number of them, 
dishonored before the world, their character lost, their credit 
ruined, their faith a by-word among the nations? If there be 
any such man here or elsewhere, he is no true friend to his 
country's honor. For, Sir, the honor of each individual State in 
this Union is bound up in the same bundle of life with that of 
every other, and they constitute together the honor of the nation. 
It is in vain to say that, if we can only pay our own way, and 
keep our own head above water, our character is safe. The 
people of the United States are one people. They rule alike, in 
State and in nation. They cannot keep their faith and break 
their faith. They cannot maintain two characters, nor can a 
stain iipon the character of any portion of them fail to cast a 
reflected stain upon the character of all the rest. 

Doubtless, the conduct of many of the States has been rash 
and reckless in incurring so great liabilities. But who stimulated 
that rashness ? who spurred on that recklessness ? It is not my 
desire to mingle party criminations in this debate, but I cannot 
help thinking that it is the duty of those who are now in power 
to remember, in this connection, that these wild investments of 
State credit in banks and internal improvements were among 
the most direct and undoubted consequences of that mad spirit 
of speculation which the wanton experiments of our predecessors 
originally engendered, — a spirit whose ravages upon the pros- 
perity and welfare of the country it is our high and special com- 
mission from the people to repair. 

But there is another consideration connected with the origin 
of these debts which we ought even less to lose sight of. By 
far the greater part of the liabilities under which so many of the 
States are now oppressed, were incurred for a national object. 
Let not gentlemen start when I pronounce internal improve- 
ments a national object. I am not going to argue the constitu- 
tionality or expediency of undertaking such works by national 
authority. What I mean to say, and all I mean to say, is, that 
they exert a most powerful and momentous influence on the na- 



THE PROCEEDS OF THE PUBLIC LANDS. 299 

tional prosperity and the national permanency. What is there 
so eminently calculated to bind together this blessed Union of 
ours in the bonds of mutual friendship and mutual interest, mu- 
tual confidence and kindness, as the railroad system ? How does 
it enable us to laugh to scorn the prophecies of dissolution and 
separation, which are so often founded on our extent of territory ? 
What capacities, of almost indefinite reach, has it not given to 
our republican machinery? What new elements of democracy 
has it not introduced into the action of that machinery ? James 
Madison, in the Federalist, pronounced the necessary limits of 
a democracy to be those within which the whole people could 
meet together conveniently to consult on their own affairs, — and 
the necessary limits of a republic, those within which the repre- 
sentatives of the people could assemble, as often as it was need- 
ful, to attend to the business of their constitutents. Sir, railroads 
are to distance, what representation is to numbers. From what 
corner of the continent of North America might not the repre- 
sentatives of the people easily and often come together by the 
agency of this railroad system? Nay, has not the same mira- 
culous agency exhibited the people themselves, during the last 
year, taking their own business into their own hands, and com- 
ing together from places hundreds, and I had almost said thou- 
sands, of miles apart, to consult on their common fortunes ? 

Our fathers, Mr. Chairman, without distinction of party, con- 
sidered internal improvements, even before railroads were known, 
as national objects. They differed as to the constitutional power 
of constructing them. But even those who maintained that 
such a power did not exist, were of opinion that it ought to 
exist. Hear what Thomas Jefferson himself said on this subject, 
in his last message of his last term, when he was parting from 
public hfe forever, and had no longer any ambitious objects to 
subserve, — a passage to which I beg the attention of the Com^ 
mittee, as proving not only that Jefferson was in favor of inter- 
nal improvements at that period of his life, but of accumulat- 
ing even a surplus revenue to pay for them : 

" The probalile accumulation of the surphises of revenue beyond what can be 
applied to the payment of the public debt, whenever the freedom and safety of our 
commerce shall be restored, merits the consideration of Congress. Shall it lie unpro^ 



300 THE PROCEEDS OF THE PUBLIC LANDS. 

ductive in the public vaults ? Shall the revenue be reduced ? Or, shall it not rather 
be appropriated to the improvement of roads, canals, rivers, education, and other 
great foundations of prosperity and union, under the powers which Congress may 
already possess, or such amendment of the Constitution as may be approved by the 
States ? " 

This was the language of Mr. Jefferson in 1808. He may 
have changed his opinions at a later day, but these were the 
opinions which he expressed in his last official declaration to the 
country. The same sentiments may be found even more fully 
developed in one of his previous messages. The same senti- 
ments were more than once expressed by Mr. Monroe. And 
we all know what were the opinions of my honored colleague 
in front of me (Mr. J. Q. Adams.) Had his views been sus- 
tained by the country, it may be safely said that the States 
would have had far less occasion to involve themselves in debt 
for works of this sort. But, Sir, the day for any regret on that 
score is past. I only desired to remind the Committee that it 
was mainly for these objects of internal improvement, — thus 
by the united testimony of our fathers, and thus tenfold more 
by our own experience of agencies invented since they went 
down to their graves, objects of national concern, — that it was 
for these that the great burden of State liabilities had been 
contracted. Unquestionably the States have prosecuted these 
works too extensively. Unquestionably many of the works they 
have constructed are gi-eatly in advance of the public wants. 
Led away, in part, by the seductive influence of government 
experiments, they were hurried along still more by the admira- 
tion and excitement which the extraordinary inventions of our 
day could not but occasion. They caught something of the 
impetus of the marvellous enginery they were constructing. 
They did not learn soon enough the use of the brakes, or were 
too much excited to hold them hard enough down ; and they 
have thus been borne along to the very brink of their own ruin. 
But it was in a noble cause, and one which, though it has 
involved them in embarrassments, has contributed incalculably 
to the prosperity and permanency of the Union. 

And here, Mr. Chairman, I must be allowed to allude to an 
imputation upon the Northern and Eastern members of this 



THE PROCEEDS OF THE PUBLIC LANDS. 301 

House, which fell originally, I think, from the honorable member 
from Maine, (Mr. Clifford,) but which was repeated by the honor- 
able member from Georgia, (Mr. Alford.) It was this, — that 
we were in favor of the measure on your table only as the basis, 
or entering wedge, I believe it was called, of a protective tariff. 
The same charge was made against us a day or two ago from 
another quarter, when we voted for the paltry sum of twenty- 
five thousand dollars for the relief of the widow of the lamented 
Harrison. There was somethijig more of absurdity in the latter 
charge than in the former, but there was no more of injustice. 
Sir, I shall never disclaim the character of being a friend to the 
American System, nor ever fail to give my vote or voice in its 
behalf, whenever an opportunity occurs. But I spurn the impu- 
tation that any opinions on this subject are the source of my 
support to the present bill. It would be easy, if I were disposed 
to indulge in retorts or recriminations, to charge upon gentle- 
men who oppose this bill, that the principles on which they con- 
demn it are only the cover for their hostility to every thing like 
a custom-house duty. But I will make no charges of any sort. 
It is enough for me to deny for myself and my northern col- 
leagues, that there is any thing selfish or sectional in our support 
of this measure. Sir, if there be any thing sectional, it is not 
our own section that we regard in this matter. It is for Georgia 
we feel, if she has contracted any debts which she finds it diifi- 
cult to discharge. It is for Mississippi, and Alabama, and Illi- 
nois, and Indiana, and Ohio, and Maryland, and Pennsylvania. 
As for New England, there are but five millions of State 
debts among all six of her States, and four millions and a half 
of those are the debts of Massachusetts. And let me assure the 
House I do not plead for Massachusetts in this business. She 
would not thank me for asking aid from any quarter in redeem- 
ing her liabilities. Her stock has, from the beginning, stood 
second to none on the foreign Exchange, and second to none it 
will stand to the end. The character of her roads is an ample 
guaranty of her bonds. But her credit rests on something higher 
than the profits of her travel or the income of her treasury. The 
industry of her people is the indorser of her paper; — an indus- 
try, the manufacturing branch of which alone has been proved 

26 



302 THE PROCEEDS OF THE PUBLIC LANDS. 

to yield a product of almost ninety millions of dollars in a sin- 
gle year, and which would be ready, I will warrant, to respond 
in the full amount of its hard but honest earnings, rather than the 
credit of the Commonwealth should be called in question for a 
moment. 

It is no mere figure of speech, Mr. Chairman, to say that the 
industry of the population of Massachusetts is the indorser of 
her bonds. I remember well to have heard ray honored friend, 
the Secretary of State, say, on some public occasion, that, hap- 
pening to show to an English gentleman of fortune, during his 
late visit to the mother country, a copy of the statistical tables 
which exhibited the enormous annual product of Massachusetts 
labor, the inquiry was instantly made — has she any stock in 
the market? — which, being answered in the affirmative, was 
forthwith followed by an investment in her stock of some fifty 
or sixty thousand dollars, or, it may have been, pounds. 

Indeed, Sir, I may say, not only as to this, but as to all the 
other great measures of reform which are proposed for our con- 
sideration at the present session, that no part of the country is 
more independent than New England, and no State more so 
than Massachusetts. Whether you look to the Distribution Act, 
or the Bank Act, or the Bankrupt Act, which constitute, per- 
haps, the trinoda necessitas of the times, Massachusetts can af- 
ford to be as indiflerent as any State in the Union. She needs 
no proceeds of land sales to prop her credit. She needs no Na- 
tional Bank to render her own currency sound and uniform. 
"While, as to the bankrupt law, her main interest in that, is the 
interest of a creditor, anxious that her debtors in the South and 
West should have a chance to wipe ofT their old scores even at 
great loss to herself, in order that they may once more resume 
their relations as customers, and give her an opportunity to trade 
with them and trvist them again. 

And even as to the tariff' itself, I am inclined to think she can 
hold out without murmuring, under a reduction of duties, at 
least as long as the iron workers of Pennsylvania, or the wheat 
growers of New York, or the tobacco planters of Virginia and 
Maryland. Nor does she desire, as I believe, the adoption of 
any measure on the subject, but such as may seem necessary, in 



THE PROCEEDS OP THE PUBLIC LANDS. 303 

a broad, comprehensive, national view, and after a due investi- 
gation of the facts, to protect the common interests of all 
branches of American industry, against the unequal competi- 
tion of foreign labor, or the injurious influence of foreign legis- 
lation. 

But there are other States in the Union with far heavier loads 
upon their backs, and, perhaps, a good deal less able to bear 
them. And though this bill may not give them all they require, 
it will afford them unquestionably a most welcome relief. As 
was justly remarked by the President, in his late message, 
" with States laboring under no extreme pressure from debt, 
the fund which they would derive from this source would 
enable them to improve their condition in an eminent degree." 
" With the debtor States, it would effect relief to a great extent 
of the citizens from a heavy burden of direct taxation which 
presses with severity on the laboring classes, and eminently 
assist in restoring the general prosperity. An immediate ad- 
vance would take place in the price of the State securities, and 
the attitude of the States would become once more, as it ever 
should be, lofty and erect." 

And now let me protest once more against being charged with 
advocating either a direct or indirect assumption of the State 
debts. And in aid of that protest, let me summon up a single 
fact from the most familiar history of the past. I mean the fact 
that this same measure of distribution was not only proposed, but 
passed by a majority of both branches of Congress, before one 
dollar of State debt was contracted. General Jackson's veto ar- 
rested it. There can be no pretence, then, that this measure was 
devised with any reference to State debts. The most that can be 
said is, — and that I fearlessly avow, — that we are impelled by 
the existence and pressure of those debts, to make another and 
a stronger effort to carry through and consummate a scheme, 
which we had long before approved and advocated. 

Mr. Chairman, these are the views, briefly and imperfectly ex- 
pressed, which, in my own mind, outweigh all considerations of 
the necessities of our own Treasury, and compel me to vote for 
this bill. The necessities of the Treasury can be supplied from 
other sources. The nation is not yet in such a beggarly condi- 



304 THE PROCEEDS OF THE PUBLIC LANDS. 

tion as gentlemen would have us think. True, Sir, the revenues 
of the country have been most extravagantly and wastefuUy 
dealt with, for some years past. Our cash on hand has all been 
expended, and our credit largely drawn upon. But we have 
inexhaustible resources still left, and a generous and patriotic 
people to sustain us in putting them in requisition. It will be 
time enough to discuss this question, however, when the Revenue 
Bill comes up. I will only say now, in reply to calculations and 
estimates which have been made on the other side, that, — from 
the best information I can obtain, from those accustomed to ex- 
amine into such matters in the mercantile community which I 
have the honor to represent, — an additional revenue of many 
millions of dollars might be raised by a twenty per cent, ad valo- 
rem duty on a home valuation of three articles only, which are 
now on the free list, — I mean silks, stutF-goods, and linens. 

One idea more, Mr. Chairman, and I will conclude. Sir, I 
maintain that this, after all, is not a question between distribut- 
ing the proceeds of the public lands among the States, and re- 
taining them honestly and permanently in the Treasury. Gen- 
tlemen hold up to the House and to the country a false issue in 
presenting the question in that form. Have they forgotten that 
there is such a word as cession in the dictionary, or, as my col- 
league in front of me said the other day, on another subject, are 
their " lips forbid to name that once familiar word?" I do not 
mean s-e-s-session. We have heard enough about extra sessions, 
and extraordinary sessions, and the extraordinary doings of extra- 
ordinary sessions. Honorable members all round the House 
have rung these changes to our heart's content. I mean c-e-s- 
cession. Have gentlemen forgotten that General Jackson him- 
self proposed in his first message to Congress, that " the public 
lands should cease as soon as practicable to be a source of reve- 
nue," and that the proposition was approved and sustained by 
the great mass of his friends and followers ? Have they forgot- 
ten that a plan for ceding the lands to the States in which they 
lie, — a measure which, if commenced in favor of the existing 
States, must in all equity be carried out as fast as new States 
are formed, and which would thus ultimately cover the whole 
public domain, — was devised not a hundred years ago, and not 



THE PROCEEDS OF THE PUBLIC LANDS. 305 

a thousand miles from South Carolina itself? — A plan for 
giving up outright one half of the proceeds, and leaving us, as I 
think, little or no hope of ever seeing any thing of the other 
half. It does not lie, Mr. Chairman, with gentlemen who have 
advanced or sustained such schemes as these, to charge the 
friends of distribution with abstractins: the revenues or robbing 
the exchequer. 

I will not detain the Committee by going into any examina- 
tion of this project of cession. Let me only say, that all that is 
just and reasonable I shall always be willing, so far as ray vote 
is concerned, to yield to the new States. I rejoice in the rapid- 
ity of their advancement, even although, in the scale of national 
importance, the law of their increase is the law of our decrease. 
I welcome their Ptcpresentatives as they come, thronging in 
augmented numbers, under a new apportionment, to occupy this 
hall, even though it should be to push some of us from our 
stools. It gave me a thrill of pleasure and of pride not often 
experienced, when an honorable Senator from Indiana (Mr. 
Smith) told me the other day in conversation that, after careful 
examination, he believed that no one measure which had ever 
been passed by Congi-ess for the benefit of the new States, could 
have been carried through without the votes of Massachusetts. 
I hope they may never ask for those votes in vain. For one, I 
will not cavil about the ten per cent, allowed them in this bill. 
I do not begrudge them the half million of acres which it pro- 
poses to make up to them. I go cheerfully even for the preemp- 
tion clause. But I believe the contemplated cession would be a 
fatal dowry to them, as well as a measure full of injustice to us. 
Between that, therefore, and distribution, which I consider the 
real question at stake, I cannot hesitate a moment. 



26 * 



THE 

POLICY OF DISCRIMINATING DUTIES. 

A SPEECH IX FAVOR OF MR. FILEMORE'S RESOLUTION, TO REFER THAT 
PART OF THE PRESIPEXT'S MESSAGE RELATIXG TO THE TARIFF TO THE 
COMMITTEE OX MANUFACTURES, DELIVERED IN THE HOUSE OF REPRE- 
SENTATIVES OF THE UNITED STATES, DECEMBER 30, 1841. 



I HAVE been hoping, from day to day, and from hour to horn-, 
]VIr. Speaker, that this debate would be brought to a close, and 
have more than once repressed a strong disposition to address 
the House, from a reluctance to render myself in any degree 
responsible for prolonging a discussion, which seems to me so 
exceedingly unreasonable and unprofitable ; but as the House 
has exhibited a purpose to allow it to run on without let or limit- 
ation, at least until after the holy days, I have determined to deny 
myself no longer. 

I have no intention, however, to go into a general discussion 
of the policy of a protecting tariff. If I had succeeded in get- 
ting the floor this day last week, when I made three or four 
unsuccessful efforts to obtain it, I might have been tempted to 
do so. But my honorable friend and colleague, (Mr. Hudson,) 
who addressed the House a few days ago, has anticipated me in 
so many of the views I had intended to present, as to leave me 
very little material for such a discussion. And he has presented 
those views, let me add, with so much fulness and so much 
force, as to afford no apology whatever for repeating them. I 
can but follow as a gleaner, therefore, in a field which has been 
most effectively reaped, and can only hope to offer some addi- 
tional facts and illustrations on points which have already been 
most ably enforced. And even this, K^ir, I should have had much 



THE POLICY OF DISCRIMINATING DUTIES. 307 

hesitation at attempting, but for the remarks of the honorable 
member from Georgia, (Mr. Meriwether.) who has just taken his 
seat, and who, in the course of a very able speech, has advanced 
some ideas which ought not to be passed over in silence. 

Before proceeding to notice them, however, I desire to make 
one or two preliminary observations. And in the first place. Sir, 
I freely acknowledge that, in my judgment, something more of 
importance has been attached to the precise issue before us than 
really belongs to it. As a question of parliamentary propriety, 
indeed, it is by no means unworthy of consideration. This 
House, in its organization, has adopted the principle of a divi- 
sion of labor. It has distributed its members into twenty or 
thirty different committees, with reference to the twenty or thirty 
distinct subjects into which the business of the nation has been 
arranged. Among these is a Committee of Manufactures. It is 
in vain for gentlemen to say that there ought to be no such 
committee. It actually exists. And in reply to a suggestion 
thrown out the other day, that the Southern members of the 
House must have been asleep — must have been caught nap- 
ping — when such a committee was constituted, let me say, that 
the motion upon which the Committee of Manufactures was 
separated from the Committee of Commerce in 1819, and 
received a distinct existence, was made by a Southern member. 
Mr. Peter Little, a representative from Maryland, was the author 
of the motion; and, for aught which appears on the journals, 
it was adopted entirely without opposition. And now I see not, 
for my life, what subject this committee can fairly claim as its 
own, if not this very one of discriminating, in the imposition of 
duties, with reference to our manufacturing interests. What, 
let me ask, is my honorable colleague, (Mr. Saltonstall,) at the 
head of that committee, and what are his eight associates to do, 
in fulfilment of the purposes of their appointment, if not to deal 
with this precise question ? To deny it to them is virtually to 
proscribe them, and put them in Coventry for the session, so far 
as their relations as a committee are concerned. Why, Sir, my 
honorable colleague, I know, comes, emphatically, from a city of 
peace, (Salem,) and we Northern men are none of us eager to take 
offence at any thing which is said or done in this House. But 



308 THE POLICY OF DISCRIMINATING DUTIES. 

I honestly believe that, were some of the gentlemen who have 
taken part in this discussion at the head of the Committee on 
Manufactures, they would be disposed to regard it as a matter 
of personal indignity, to be thus unceremoniously deprived of 
the due honors and just responsibilities of the station, to which 
they had been fairly assigned. 

Let me repeat, however, Mr. Speaker, that, apart from this 
point of parliamentary propriety and personal justice, I regard 
the question of reference as one of but little practical importance. 
Certainly, the idea which seems to be entertained in some quar- 
ters, that the whole subject of a protecting tariff", — its constitu- 
tionality, its necessity, its propriety, its policy, — is to be dis- 
posed of forever, or even for the session, by a decision of the 
question, whether a few somewhat equivocal paragraphs in a 
President's message shall be referred to nine gentlemen asso- 
ciated under the denomination of a Committee of Ways and 
Means, or to nine other gentlemen who have been designated 
as a Committee of Manufactures, is altogether preposterous. 
The subject, depend upon it, Sir, will not be found of so easy an 
adjustment. You may refer these paragi-aphs of the message to 
what committee you please, and with what instructions you 
please ; you may refuse to refer any matter whatever to the 
Committee of Manufactures ; you may adopt the suggestion of 
a gentleman from Virginia, over the way, (Mr. Smith,) and 
abolish that committee forthwith, but still the subject will be 
agitated among the people, and still it will be forced upon the 
consideration of the representatives of the people. The voice 
of American labor cannot be so easily hushed off; it will make 
itself heard in this House, and sooner or later it will make itself 
heeded. Why, Sir, since we have been debating this question, 
a convention of iron manufacturers has been held in the city of 
New York, and they have adopted a memorial to Congress, set- 
tins forth their condition and their claims. Other conventions 
will be held by other classes of mechanics and artisans, and 
other memorials adopted. What will you do with them ? Lay 
them on the table, as you did at the last session ? Reject them 
outright? Adopt another 21st rule ? Declare that no petition 
which contains this odious term, protection, shall be received, 



THE POLICY OF DISCRIMINATING DUTIES. 309 

considered, or entertained, in any way whatsoever? No, Sir, 
you must receive them, yoa must refer them, you must act upon 
them. 

There is another remark which I desire to make, by way of 
preamble. I have very little fear, Mr. Speaker, but that the 
industry of the country is about to receive, at an early day, some 
considerable amount of frdsh incidental protection, come to what 
conclusions you may upon these abstract questions of power and 
of policy ; and that, Sir, from the mere necessity of the case. 
I had almost said, I defy you to carry on the government with- 
out involving such a result. Who imagines that this government 
can be supported on the scale now proposed, or, indeed, upon 
any scale, unless it be one of degradation and bankruptcy, under 
your existing revenue system ? Who dreams, more especially, 
that these magnificent projects of reforin which have recently 
emanated from the various departments of the administration; 
the increase of the navy ; the building of these steam frigates 
and sloops of war; the establishment of these naval schools at 
home, and these naval posts abroad ; the endowment of these 
private mercantile steam-packet corporations ; the trebling of the 
marine corps ; the addition of new regiments to your army ; the 
improvement of harbors ; the completion of fortifications ; the 
establishment of founderies ; the extension of a chain of military 
posts from Council Bluffs to the Pacific ; the purchase of a right 
of way for the national mail over the various railroads along its 
route ; — who dreams, I say, that all or any of these truly noble, 
truly national projects, so many of which have commended 
themselves at first sight to the approbation and admiration of a 
patriotic people, can — I do not say, be carried through, for no- 
body supposes that they are to be completed in a day but — be 
commenced, be initiated, be put on the way to a gradual and 
economical accomplishment, without greater resources than will 
be afforded under the final operation of the compromise act? 
Nobody, I am sure. Where, then, will you look for additional 
resources? To loans and treasury notes ? That will be looking 
to the means of postponement, not to the means of payment. 
To duties on tea and coffee ? Party competition, the struggle 
of political leaders to outrun each other in a scrub-race for a 



310 THE POLICY or DISCRIMINATING DUTIES. 

little momentary popularity, has put an end, for the present at 
least, I imagine, to all hopes of obtaining revenue from that 
source, even were there a willingness to resort to it upon other 
considerations. Do you look to the proceeds of the public 
lands? I do not believe, Sir, that there is a majority in this 
House ready to repeal so soon the great measure of the last 
session, by which those proceeds were distributed, and to wrench 
the proffered cup of relief from the States, in this hour of their 
utmost agony, and before they have tasted one cordial draught. 
But even should this be done, your revenues would still be in- 
sufficient. Upon what, then, can you rely for increasing them ? 
Does any one propose a resort to direct taxation ? More than 
one of the minority in this House have expressed their appro- 
bation of such a course, and eulogized the equality and demo- 
cracy of its operation. I do not find, however, that anybody 
expects to live to see the day when it will be adopted. There 
is, then, but one mode left. You must increase your resources 
by raising the duties on imposts. And when you do this, not- 
withstanding the confident declaration of the gentleman from 
South Carolina, (Mr. Rhett,) that revenue and protection are 
utterly incompatible, and that where one begins the other ends, 
I have little fear but that the industry of the country will receive 
some share of the advantage. 

And now, Mr. Speaker, in turning to a consideration of that 
protecting policy which has been so long the subject of discus- 
sion, I am met at the threshold by the declaration of the honor- 
able member from Georgia yesterday, that he and his constituents, 
as Southern men, do not oppose these discriminating duties merely 
because they would affect their own interests; that they do not 
plant themselves on the mere pecuniary question ; but that they 
take higher ground, — that they stand on the Constitution. 
I am not, however, about to enter into an elaborate argument 
on this question of constitutionality. The whole history of the 
adoption of the Constitution ; the condition of the country at 
the time of its adoption ; the debates of the Federal Convention 
which framed, and of the popular conventions which ratified it ; 
the petitions, resolutions, and proceedings of the people in all 
parts of the country, both immediately before and immediately 



THE POLICY OF DISCRIMINATING DUTIES. 311 

after its adoption, and particularly of the manufacturing and 
mechanical classes of the people, — from Paul Pritchard, the ship- 
wright, of Charleston, South Carolina, whose petition stands on 
the first page of one of the first volumes of our American State 
Papers, to Paul Revere, the coppersmith, of Boston, Massachu- 
setts, who preached, if he did not pray, to the same effect ; — the 
debates and enactments of the first Congress, too, in immediate 
response to these petitions of the people ; all these, Sir, to say 
nothing of the whole history of legislation since, constitute a 
chain of evidence on this point so close and so complete, that, 
for one, I am entirely unwilling to give sanction to the idea that 
it is an open question, by arguing it further. It seems to me, I 
confess, that the gentleman from Georgia quite too literally 
stands upon the Constitution, and tramples its true intent 
beneath his feet, in the doctrine for which he contends. 

If the honorable gentleman, however, really desires to run a 
tilt and break a lance upon this part of the subject, let me refer 
him to the opinion of Mr. Madison. Not, Sir, to any mere 
obiter dictum in a Presidential message, but to a detailed and 
elaborate argument, contained in a letter devoted to the subject, 
and written to Mr. Cabell, of Virginia, in September, 1828. As 
this document has not been alluded to in the course of the 
debate, I beg leave to present to the House a brief abstract of it, 
which I have hastily prepared. 

Mr. Madison proposes, in this letter, to give the grounds of 
the "confident opinion" which he had previously expressed in 
conversation, " of the constitutionality of the power in Congress 
to impose a tariff" for the encouragement of manufactures." 

He derives this power from the authority expressly given to 
Congress "to regulate trade with foreign nations;" and, after 
some introductory remarks as to the meaning of the term, "regu- 
lation of trade," as contended for by our fathers in their contro- 
versies with the mother country, he states the subject which he 
is about to argue in these explicit terms, — "It is a simple 
question, under the Constitution of the United States, whether 
the power to regulate trade with foreign nations, as a distinct 
and substantive item in the enumerated powers, embraces the 
object of encouraging, by duties, restrictions, and prohibitions, 



312 THE rOLICY OF DISCRIMINATING DUTIES. 

the manufactures and products of the country." And he then 
proceeds to argue that " the affirmative must be inferred " from 
the eight following considerations, upon each of which he dwells 
at more or less length : — 

1. The meaning of the phrase "to regulate trade" must be 
sought in the objects to which the power was generally under- 
stood to be applicable, when it was inserted in the Constitution. 

2. The power has been understood and used by all commercial 
and manufacturing nations, without exception, as embracing the 
object of encouraging manufactures. 

3. This has been particularly the case with Great Britain, 
whose commercial vocabulary is the parent of ours. 

4. Such was understood to be a proper use of the power by 
the States most prepared for manufacturing industry, whilst 
retaining the power over their foreign trade. 

5. Such a use of the power by Congress accords with the 
intention and expectation of the States, in transferring the power 
over trade from themselves to the Government of the United 
States. 

6. If Congress have not the power, it is annihilated for the 
nation ; a policy without example in any other nation. 

7. If revenue be the sole object of legitimate impost, and the 
encouragement of domestic articles be not within the power of 
regulating trade, it would follow that no monopolizing or unequal 
regulations of foreign nations could be counteracted; that neither 
the staple articles of subsistence, nor the essential implements 
of the public safety, could be insured or fostered at home ; and 
that American navigation must be at once abandoned or speed- 
ily destroyed. 

8. That the encouragement of manufactures was an object of 
the power to regulate trade, is proved by the use made of the 
power for that object in the first session of the first Congress, 
under the Constitution, when among the members present were 
so many who had been members of the Federal Convention 
which framed the Constitution, and of the State Conventions 
which ratified it; each of these classes consisting, also, of mem- 
bers who had opposed, and who had espoused, the Constitution 
in its actual form, by no one of whom w^as that power denied. 



THE POLICY OF DISCRIMINATING DUTIES. 313 

And here Mr. Madison proceeds to mention that several Virginia 
members, of the anti-federal as well as federal party, proposed 
not only duties, but prohibitions, in favor of several articles of 
Virginia production ; one, for instance, a duty on foreign coal ; 
another, a duty on foreign hemp ; and a third, a prohibition on 
foreign beef. 

Such, Mr. Speaker, is the elaborate argument of one who has 
often been called the Father of the Constitution. I need not 
detain the House by pointing out how perfect an answer it con- 
tains to the argument of the gentleman from Georgia yesterday, 
and how completely it scatters into thin air all the distinctions 
and difi'erences which he has attempted to set up this morning. 
Let me only say that, when the constitutionality of the protect- 
ing system is assailed, I, for one, desire nothing better to hold 
up in its defence than this true old Virginia shield ; fabricated, 
let me add, upon the same old Virginia forge which gave shape 
and substance to the celebrated resolutions of '98. 

But my excellent friend from North Carolina, (Mr. Rayner,) 
some days ago, seemed disposed to escape from the force of 
these old opinions and these historical arguments, by declaring 
that we lived under a new dispensation. A new dispensation, 
Sir ! By whom was it delivered ? By whom has it been sanc- 
tioned ? Was it the work of the people, or of the States ? Who 
was its high-priest ? Qiiibus indiciis — upon what evidence does 
it rest, and by what signs has it been attested ? Where does 
he find the terms of it? In the South Carolina ordinance, or 
in that notorious epistle of Mr. Van Buren to the citizens of 
Scott County, Kentucky, in which he told us that, after a depart- 
ure of half a century, our Government had been brought back, 
by a single signature of his own, to the true spirit of the Con- 
stitution ? My honorable friend, I am sure, will look to no such 
documents as these for his authority. And he must pardon me 
if, in default of some better evidence of its genuineness and 
authenticity than has yet been adduced, I pronounce this new 
dispensation of his altogether apocryphal. 

But perhaps the gentleman referred to the compromise act. 
Why, Sir, the compromise act, as I maintain, abandons the 
whole idea of the unconstitutionality of a protecting system. 

27 



314 THE POLICY OF DISCRIMINATING DUTIES. 

That act, by the express admission of all the parties to it, pro- 
vides for protecting duties below the maximum of 20 per cent. 
And in what clause of the Constitution is it found written, that 
protection below 20 per cent, is any more legitimate than pro- 
tection above 20 per cent. ? 

I cannot part from this point of the subject, Mr. Speaker, with- 
out alluding to a remark made by the honorable member from 
South Carolina, (Mr. Rhett,) the other day, that Mr. Appleton 
and Mr. Lawrence, of Boston, were once foremost in denying 
the constitutionality of duties for protection, and that Mr. Web- 
ster had argued to the same effect, even in old Faneuil Hall itself. 
Sir, if these distinguished gentlemen, all of them my predecessors 
in the seat which I have the honor to hold, have been guilty of 
any such inconsistency of opinion, — if these Northern stars have, 
at any time, been seen shooting thus wildly across the sky, and 
exhibiting themselves in the very opposite quarter of the heavens 
from that in which they first attracted the eye of the observer, 
they have at least not been without example in this irregular 
motion. There are Southern luminaries, which might be named, 
which have manifested far more of this wandering, planetary 
character, which have shot far more madly from the spheres 
which they once adorned, and whose orbits, to this day, defy 
the utmost power of politico-astronomical calculation. But I 
take issue with the gentleman as to the fact. A large part of 
the people of Boston, undoubtedly, were at one time strongly 
opposed to a protecting tariff'. Their interests were, and are 
still, greatly commercial. And some of them, in the belief that 
their commercial interests were about to be injuriously affected 
by a system of discriminating duties — a belief, let me add, 
which very few of them, as I think, now enteTtain — expressed 
themselves warmly and strongly against their imposition, by 
resolutions and otherwise, in Faneuil Hall and elsewhere. But 
that Mr. LawTcnce or IMr. Appleton ever disputed the constitu- 
tional authority of Congress to impose such duties, I know of 
no evidence whatever, while Mr. Webster expressly denied the 
correctness of this allegation in regard to himself, in his memo- 
rable reply to General Haync. 

And here, Sir, let me turn to another point in the case. An 



THE POLICY OP DISCRIMINATINa DUTIES. 



315 



attempt has been made, in the course of this debate, to give to 
this tarijff question the shape of a controversy between New 
England and the other parts of the Union. Indeed, it has been 
always a favorite policy with the opponents of the protecting 
system, to hold it up to odium as a mere New England, and some- 
times even as a mere Massachusetts, interest. The honorable 
gentleman from South Carolina, especially, spoke most empha- 
tically of the insatiate importunity of the Eastern manufacturers 
on this subject. Not satisfied, he told us, with the protection 
they obtained in 1816, they came again in 1824 ; they came 
again in 1828 ; they came again in 1832 ; and he represented 
them as coming still, and, like the daughters of the horseleech, 
crying always, give! give! Sir, my honorable colleague, (Mr. 
Hudson,) has already well said that there are other and many 
other States quite as much interested in this question as the 
New England States. New England labor, depend upon it, can 
earn a living under any system which will suit the labor of the 
Middle and Western States. If they can do without protection, 
we can. If they are ready to surrender the principle of discri- 
mination, we are ready. And we shall see who will hold out 
longest, and who will cry out first. But what is the historical 
fact in relation to the tariffs of '16 and '24, and '28 and '32 ? 
How does the record bear out the assertion that these were the 
results of New England importunity and greediness? Here, 
Sir, is a tabular statement exhibiting the votes of the different 
States by which these various bills were carried through the 
House of Representatives. Let us see how it runs : 



Tariff op 


1816. 


Yeas. 


Nays 


New England 16 


10 


Middle States 44 


10 


Western States 14 


3 


Southern States 14 


31 


Tariff of 


1824. 


Yeas. 


Nays 


New England 1 5 


23 


Middle States 60 


15 


Western States 31 


7 


Southern States 1 


57 



Absent. 

16 

13 

5 

7 



Absent. 
1 
1 
2 





Tariff of 


1828. 






Yeas. 


Nays. 


Absent 


New England 


15 


24 





Middle States 


57 


11 


8 


Western States 


29 


10 


1 


Southern States 


3 


50 


5 


Tariff of 


1832. 






Yeas, 


Nays. 


Absent 


New England 


17 


17 


5 


Middle States 


52 


18 


6 


Western States 


36 


3 


1 


Southern States 


27 


27 


4 



316 



THE POLICY OF DISCRIMINATING DUTIES. 



Here, too, is another table exhibiting the votes of Massachu- 
setts alone on these several occasions : 



Tariff of 1 SI 6 


Yeas. 
7 


Nays. 
4 


Absent. 
9 


Tariff of 1828 


Yeas. 
2 


Nays. 
11 


Absent 



1824 


1 


11 


1 


1832 


4 


8 


1 



And thus falls to the ground the whole charge of the gentle- 
man from South Carolina against New England monopolists 
and extortioners ! Thus we see that in favor of not one of these 
four tariffs was there a majority either of the New England or of 
the Massachusetts delegation! Of the tariff' of 1816 we all 
know something of the parentage. Its principal authors and 
advocates are understood to have been Mr. Lowndes and Mr. 
Calhoun of South Carolina; and I have more than once heard, 
from those whose authority can hardly be questioned, that the 
friends of this measure in Massachusetts endeavored to exert an 
influence upon at least one of these gentlemen, (Mi*. Lowndes,) 
to prevent him from overdoing the matter, and pushing his pro- 
tective policy too far. We see, too, in these tables, by whose 
votes all these successive measures were sustained. They were, 
emphatically, the measures of the Middle and Western States; 
and whatever benefit New England has received from them, has 
been received in spite of her own votes. 

But the honorable gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Meriwether) 
has undertaken to prove that the Middle and Western States 
have no interest at all in this protecting system. He has told 
us that the South furnishes the best market for the grazing and 
grain-growing States. He has given us a graphic description of 
the great droves and herds of cattle, mules, and swine, which he 
has seen " on their winding way " from the West to the South, 
the like of which, he thinks, were never beheld in New England. 
And he has proceeded to argue from all this, that the true inte- 
rest of the Middle and Western States is to unite with the South 
in opposition to discriminating duties. 

Now, in the first place, Mr. Speaker, I am glad to hear a 
Southern gentleman thus frankly admit, that the South is not 
independent of all the world beside, or even of all the rest of the 
Union, for its supplies ; and that something beside the fertility of 
its own lands, and the labor of its own negroes, enters into the 



THE POLICY OF DISCRIMINATING DUTIES. 317 

production of its annual crop. It is true that the Middle and 
Western States furnish the South with vast quantities of indis- 
pensable stores and stock. The Yankees, also, let it not be 
forgotten, send her " a heap of notions;" supplying her not only 
with much of her clothing and many of her implements, but with 
ships to transport her great staple to a market. The exports of 
the country are thus not altogether of Southern production. 
The North, the Middle, and the West, it appears, lend a hand 
in raising that much-vaunted cotton crop. Even if the famous 
forty-bale theory were true, therefore, and the duties on imports 
were a burden only on the producer of the exports, the South 
alone would not be oppressed, but the other parts of the Union 
would bear a share of the burden. 

But, again, sir, admitting it to be true that the South furnishes 
the best market for the produce of the grain-growing States, how 
does it follow that it is therefore the interest of these States to 
join with the South in opposing a protective tariff? Why, such 
an inference is a Tp\a.'m petitio principii — a begging of the whole 
question at issue. It takes for granted that it is the interest of 
the South to oppose protection. It takes for granted that the 
Southern theory is correct, and that the power of the South to 
raise cotton, and to dispose of it to advantage when raised, and 
to purchase and pay for the products of the Middle and Western 
States with the proceeds, is in some way diminished or im- 
paired by the encouragement of domestic manufactures. 

Now, the gentleman well knows that this is a theory which the 
friends of protection utterly dispute and deny. They maintain, 
in precise contradiction to all this, that the establishment of 
American cotton mills, under a system of discriminating duties, 
not only leaves the power of producing the raw material at the 
South entirely unimpaired, but encourages the extension of that 
production, creates a new market for it at home, and insures it 
a readier and a more certain sale, and at an enhanced price. 
And they maintain that this has actually been the result of such 
a system as long as it has existed. 

Sir, I confess I was not a little astonished to hear the gentle- 
man from Georgia place so light an estimate on the home market 
which has been already created for cotton. Does the gentleman 

27* 



318 THE POLICY OP DISCRIMINATING DUTIES. 

forget that, if that cloud, no bigger than a man's hand, which has 
so long been visible, instead of sinking below the horizon again, 
as I heartily hope it soon will, should come up, as gentlemen are 
so fond of predicting it will, and overspread the sky, and bring 
down upon us the pitiless storm of war, this home market would 
be the only market for that great staple ? But, without dwell- 
ing on its importance in case of war, is it really so insignificant 
and contemptible as the gentleman has pronounced it, in time 
of peace ? The consumption of cotton in the United States has 
already reached the amount of one hundred and ten millions of 
pounds per annum, — an amount greater than that which this 
country has exported to France until the last year, and within 
fifteen or twenty millions of pounds as large as the whole French 
consumption ; an amount equal to one third of our average export 
of cotton to Great Britain, and to about one fourth of the entire 
British consumption ; an amount as great as was consumed in 
Great Britain at the date of the tariff of 1816 ; an amount equal 
to the whole cotton crop of the United States in 1821, about the 
time the first cotton factory was erected at Lowell ; and more 
than one sixth part of the average crop at this day. 

Nor is the influence of the home market, if I have heard aright, 
confined to the amount of its direct purchases. It has been often 
stated, both in public and private, and never to my knowledge 
denied, that the agents of the Eastern factories come into the 
market early, and buy the first part of the crop, and do much 
towards fixing a price, and a high price, for the whole. The 
value of this influence of the Eastern demand has sometimes 
been rated as high as from one to two cents a pound, which, in 
the whole six or seven hundred millions of pounds, would 
amount to from six to twelve or thirteen millions of dollars. 

And this is the market which the honorable gentleman from 
Georgia is perfectly willing to part with ! It is the foreign mar- 
ket, and the foreign market only, that he cares to keep. Why, 
one would really think, from his remarks, that cotton was good 
for nothing except to export ; that it underwent some myste- 
rious and magical sea-change on its passage across the Atlantic, 
which imparted to it all its value ; or that it was only in the hands 
of foreigners that it could be wrought up into any thing which 



THE POLICY OF DISCRIMINATING DUTIES. 319 

would pay for its production ; and that all that remained on this 
side the ocean, or was worked up by American labor, was so 
much thrown away and sacrificed! 

And what, let me ask, — what is the ground of that confident 
reliance which the gentleman seems to place on the stability and 
certainty of the foreign market ? Does he find it in the earnest 
and ardent exertions in which Great Britain is at this moment 
engaged, to supply herself with this great staple from her own 
colonies ? Is the gentleman, is the South, aware of the success 
with which those efforts have thus far been crowned ? Does he 
not know that a new and indomitable impulse has been given 
to them by that abolition spirit which is agitating the British 
mind so deeply? Southern gentlemen seem to have been very 
sharp-eyed in describing the direct dangers in which that spirit 
may involve their peculiar institutions in case of war. We all 
observe a mighty new-born zeal in certain quarters in favor of 
the navy. Not a word about gunboats in these days ! The 
South is quite ready now to unite with the North in establishing 
home squadrons, and building steam frigates and sloops of war, 
to defend themselves against the possible incursions of certain 
black regiments in the West Indies. I rejoice that it is so. I 
rejoice that any thing has brought about so signal a revolution 
of opinion in favor of the navy. I rejoice that we are no longer 
disposed to let the sovereignty of the seas rest undisputed in the 
hands of any single power ; that we will no longer recognize the 
supremacy of any Ocean Queen, holding imperial sway "of every 
salt flood and each ebbing stream," and only giving leave to 
other Powers — 

" To wear their sapphire crowns, 
And wield their little tridents." 

But do Southern gentlemen see no danger in the progress of 
that British abolition movement, in time of peace, towards what 
has been called a rescue of the British conscience from the pains 
and penalties of aiding and abetting the American slave system, 
by the patronage and purchase of its products? What are the 
facts as to the increased importation of cotton from the East 
Indies into Great Britain ? The receipts of cotton from the back 



320 THE POLICY OP DISCRIMINATING DUTIES. 

country into Bombay, between June, 1840, and June, 1841, are 
stated to have been 478,606 bales, of 325 pounds each — more 
than the whole crop of the United States in 1826. Again, the 
consumption of American cotton in England, in the year 1816, 
averaged 4,036 bales per week, and the consumption of East 
India cotton in the same year averaged 207 bales per week; 
while in 1839 the consumption of American cotton had increased 
to 15,644 bales, and of East India cotton to 2,142 bales per week, 
— the latter having increased more than tenfold, while the former 
had increased less than fourfold. 

Nor let gentlemen imagine that the market of the United 
States is so absolutely essential to Great Britain for disposing of 
her printed fabrics, that she will be unwilling to take the risk of 
losing it. We take from her only about twenty-one millions of 
yards of these goods per annum, while her whole export has ave- 
raged, for three years past, more than three hundred and five 
millions of yards. She has a dozen better customers than us. 
The West Indies take more than twice as much, the Brazils and 
South American States nearly four times as much, as we take, 
of this most important branch of her manufactures. 

Mr. Speaker, I know that the idea that American cotton 
should ever cease to be sought after, and readily salable, in any 
and every market on the face of the globe, will not easily be en- 
tertained by a Southern mind. Gentlemen of the Southern 
States seem to imagine that the very thread of the destiny of 
this nation is a thread of cotton. They speak as if our political 
Fates — the Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos of our republic — had 
nothing else to spin, weave, and cut, but a cotton thread. The 
destiny of the Southern States may, perhaps, have no other in- 
gredient in its composition ; and, if so. Heaven forbid that the 
staple should be shortened or the fibre weakened ! But have 
there been no revolutions of trade, even in our own land, and 
within the memory of those now living, which should teach them 
less presumption on this point? Where is that indigo crop of 
theirs, which, fifty or sixty years ago, supplied the markets of the 
world ? — That crop, which, the historian of South Carolina tells 
us, proved more beneficial to Carolina than the mines of ]Mexico 
or Peru to Old or New Spain ? Where is it now ? Not only 



THE POLICY OP DISCRIMINATING DUTIES. 321 

is there scarce a pound of indigo exported, but there is, probably, 
scarce a plant of it grown for any thing but curiosity, in any part 
of the Union. It has given place to the cultivation of cotton. 
But under what circumstances did it give place ? Let me read 
you the history of this occurrence in a little paragraph from 
McCuUoch's Commercial Dictionary, which was made the sub- 
ject of a very striking article in one of the newspapers of my 
own city a day or two since : — 

" For the first twenty years after the English became masters of Bengal, the culture 
and manufiicture of indigo, now of such importance, was unknown as a branch of 
British industry, and the exports wore but trifling. The European markets were, at 
this period, principally supplied from America. In 1783, however, the attention of the 
English began to be directed to this business. In their hands the growth and prepara- 
tion of indigo has become the most important employment, at least in a commercial 
point of view, carried on in the country. The indigo made by the natives supplies the 
internal demand, so that all that is raised by Europeans is exported." 

And in the same paper, (the Boston Atlas,) I find an extract 
from Ramsay's History of Carolina, stating, even more directly, 
that the Indigo crop of that State was abandoned in a great de- 
gree, owing to the " large exportations of the article from the 
East Indies into England," which so lowered the price as to 
make the culture and preparation of it unprofitable. 

Sir, is there not a moral in these extracts upon which the 
planter may well ponder ? Is there not enough in them, at any 
rate, when taken in connection with other facts to which I have 
already alluded, to make him pause before he expresses so utter 
a contempt for the idea of establishing a home market for his 
cotton? 

The honorable gentleman from Georgia, however, is willing to 
run the risk, and declares his readiness, moreover, to have the 
duty of three cents a pound upon cotton imported into our 
own country abolished forthwith and forever. Well now, Mr. 
Speaker, I do not consider this proposition of the gentleman, to 
abolish the duty on raw cotton, as any very great concession on 
the part of the South. After a fabric or a product of any sort 
has enjoyed a protection, almost amounting to absolute prohibi- 
tion, for fifty years, and has attained, under its influence, to a 
perfection and a maturity which have enabled it thus far to over- 



322 TUE POLICY OF DISCRIMINATING DUTIES. 

come all competition in almost all the markets of the world, it 
is no such infallible indication of one's devotion to free trade 
principles, as the gentleman seems to imagine, to be willing to 
have the duty taken off. But it has been denied, more than 
once during the debate, that this duty on raw cotton ever ope- 
rated, or ever was intended to operate, as a protection to the 
planter; and gentlemen have added that the South never desired 
its imposition, and has been always ready to see it done away. 
Sir, I take issue, again, upon both these points. I do not pre- 
tend that the duty of three cents a pound has operated to pro- 
tect the Southern planter to any great extent for some years 
past, although I am not without high authority for thinking that 
some of the Bengal cottons might have been imported to advan- 
tage, and wrought up into the commoner and coarser goods at 
our own looms, had the duty not existed. Nay, I am not with- 
out authority for thinking that some of this East India cotton 
can be imported to advantage even under the duty as it now 
stands, reduced, as it has been by the operation of the compro- 
mise act, to about one cent a pound; and an experiment of that 
sort, I learn, is at this moment about to be instituted. But, let 
this be as it may, I maintain that the duty in question was a 
protecting duty in its origin ; that it was intended as such ; that 
it operated as such ; and, moreover, that it was complained of 
as such, by those to whose benefit it did not enure. And, in 
support of this assertion, I appeal to the report of Alexander 
Hamilton, on the subject of manufactures, in 1791 — a docu- 
ment which will be admitted as good evidence of a fact, how- 
ever it may be disputed as authority for a principle. 

Mr. Hamilton, while Secretary of the Treasury, was ordered 
by the House of Representatives, in January, 1790, to consider 
the subject of domestic manufactures, and, more especially, to 
give his views upon "the means of promoting such as will tend 
to render the United States independent on foreign nations for 
military and other essential supplies." And in this very order, 
I may remark, we have another infallible index of the under- 
standing of the first Congress as to the power to regulate trade. 
In the course of his report, Mr. Hamilton speaks of the great 
importance of encouraging the manufactories of cotton, one or 



THE POLICY OF DISCRIMINATING DUTIES. 323 

two of which had just been established in Rhode Island and 
Massachusetts, and then proceeds as follows : — 

" The present duty of three cents jDer pound on the foreign raw material is, un- 
doubtedly, a very serious impediment to the progress of those manufactories." 

" While a hope may reasonably be indulged that, with due care and attention, the 
national cotton may be made to approach nearer than it now does to that of regions 
somewhat more favored by climate, and while fixcts authorize an opinion that very 
great use may be made of it, and that it is a resource which gives greater security to 
the cotton fobrics of this country than can be enjoyed by any which depends wholly 
on external sujjply, it will certainly be wise, in every view, to let our infant manufac- 
tures have the full benefit of the best materials on the cheapest terms." 

" To secure to the national manufacturers so essential an advantage, a repeal of the 
present duty on imported cotton is indispensable." 

I might cite other passages from the same document, in which 
it is proposed, among other things, to substitute, as a more ex- 
pedient mode of protecting the cotton planter, a bounty on the 
national cotton when wrought at a home manufactory, and also 
a bounty on its exportation. But I have given enough to prove, 
conclusively, that the duty in question was regarded, in its ori- 
gin, as a duty of protection, and was thought to operate to the 
advantage of the planter, at the expense of the manufacturer, — 
to the advantage of the South, at the expense of the North. 
Nor can it be correct that there has been always a readiness for 
its repeal. If so, why was it not repealed, according to Hamil- 
ton's recommendation, in 1791 ? Why has it not been repealed 
since ? A provision for its repeal was contained in the original 
draught of the compromise act. According to that bill, as ori- 
ginally introduced, unmanufactured cotton was to be a free arti- 
cle after 1842. Why was it stricken out ? A vote was actually 
passed, too, at the last session of Congress, making cotton a 
free article, in company with salt and sugar; but not a few of 
the Southern members united in carrying its immediate recon- 
sideration, who voted against the reconsideration in relation to 
both the other articles. Where is the evidence, in all this, that 
the South is so very indifferent to the continuance of this duty? 
Are the Eastern manufacturers responsible for this measure of 
protection also ? As much so, perhaps. Sir, as they were for the 
tariff of 1816. But even if the South is ready for making cot- 
ton a free article now, it would be, as I have already suggested, 



824 THE POLICY OP DISCRIMINATING DUTIES. 

* 

but poor evidence of their willingness to endure martyrdom in 
vindication of their free trade notions. The very theory of pro- 
tection supposes that, at some time or other, the protected fabric 
or ]iroduct will be able to sustain itself without further aid. 
And for Southern gentlemen to boast of their devotion to free 
trade, because they think protection has done its work in regard 
to their own great staple, is very much like the boasting of the 
British manufacturers of their readiness for free trade, now that 
their own establishments have been built up beyond the reach 
of competition. 

And this brings me, Mr. Speaker, to a remark or two on the 
recent free trade movements in Great Britain. The gentleman 
from Georgia alluded to them yesterday with great satisfaction, 
and pointed us particularly to the conclusions of Mr. Hume's 
report. Now, Sir, there is very little evidence that the British 
nation is about to sustain and adopt the doctrines of that report. 
Already, as everybody knows, a proposition to that effect has 
cost its supporters their posts in the cabinet. But the report, 
notwithstanding, is a document of considerable interest ; and I 
desire to present to the House a few passages in it, which im- 
pressed me very deeply in a cursory perusal of it last summer, 
and which the remarks of the gentleman from Georgia have re- 
called to my remembrance. I quote first from the testimony of 
Dr. Bowrins: : — 



'& 



"I believe," says he, "inasmuch as the commercial relations of England are greater 
than those of any other coimtry, that England is always the country that is the recipi- 
ent of the greatest proportion of the prosperity of other nations. 

"Every commercial relation entered into between England and every other part of 
the world is likely to be more profitable to England than to any other country i Yes, 
England gets the greatest proportion of the benefit." 

I take, next, a passage or two from the testimony of Mr. James 
Deacon Hume : — 

" Do you consider the wealth of England to be caused and maintained by her com- 
mercial and manufacturing industry? 

"Certainly; if meant as in contradistinction from the produce of the soil. It is 
only necessary to look round the world and sec what countries there are, of much 
richer soil, that are in a state of comparative poverty, and also to look to our own 
history, of no long period, to see that, with the same quantity of land we have now, 
we were a poor country, compared with what we are ; therefore, having always had 



THE POLICY OF DISCRIMINATING DUTIES. 325 

the land, but not the trade, I must conceive that tlic increase of our riches arises from 
the trade, and not from the land. 

" Has not tlie wealth of the country arisen from the greatly increased prosperity of 
our manufacturing and commercial relations'? 

" I conceive that it can be traced to no other source. The only difference that I can 
see in the present state of the country and the country a century ago is, that by com- 
merce and manufactures we liave acquired riches, and raised up a population which 
are not only able to consume, but also able to pay good prices for the produce of our 
land. If the same population had been raised by other means, they would have been 
a burden to the land instead of an advantage. 

" Does not every limitation of food, and every rise in the price of food, tend to un- 
dermine the manufactures of the country on which we depend "? 

" I conceive that it must do so, because we place ourselves at the risk of being sur- 
passed by the manufactures in other countries ; and, as soon as it happens, if ever the 
day should arrive, that we should be put to a severe trial as to our manufacturing 
power, I can hardly doubt that the prosperity of this country will recede much faster 
than it has gone forward. 

" Do you mean whenever England shall be unable to compete with foreign markets 
in her principal staples, with otlier countries which are less burdened, and have 
cheaper food than ourselves, that then the prosperity of this country must begin to 
wane 1 

" WhencA'er foreign countries can so compete with us, from whatever cause, I con- 
ceive that our prosperity must decline; but I cannot help believing that there can be 
no other cause for that than other countries having cheaper food. 

" Is not the increased price of food in this country one of the principal ingredients 
of the increased cost of our manufactures, so as to prevent our competing with other 
countries 'I 

" I conceive that, in the long run, it must be so. It either must be so, or the manu- 
facturers and laborers must suffer great privations ; wages would first be lowei-ed as 
far as possible ; and, as many masters would be withdrawing from their trade, it is 
possible that the supply of labor would be so much greater than the demand, that the 
reduction might go to the limit of starving or riots. But it is not merely that, — it is 
the diverting of other countries from manufactures, and inducing them to take to 
agriculture instead, and also producing an interchange of goods and creating markets 
for returns for our goods, as well as finding markets for them to go to. Although, I 
conceive that the reduction in the price of food, and particularly the admission of it 
from abroad, must tend to pi-event other countries from being able to surpass us ia 
manufactures. 

" Do you not consider that we have greater advantages in production than any other 
country in the world, as regards capital and skill 1 

" I think that is the only thing that has kept us up ; but I do not think the advanta- 
ges are such that we can rely upon tlicm forever. 

" We are losing markets for our goods in return for corn, and we are compelling 
those countries to establish interests to rival us in other countries. 

" I have always thought that when the great change in this world took place, after 
the French war, before which time the foreigners had not attempted manufactures to 
any material extent, and when they had been greatly encouraged in agricultural pur- 
suits, because through the war we had been great importers, — if from that time we 
had thrown open our ports for raw produce and removed protections, we should have 

28 



326 THE POLICY OF DISCRIMINATING DUTIES. 

had our mannnictiives in a most secure position, for the other countries who are now 
attempting to rival us would not have attempted it. But it would be difficult now to 
get back to the point at which we then were. Starting at that point, we were then the 
only manufacturers." 

Here, then, INIr. Speaker, is a nation which, by the declaration 
of its own witnesses, is " always the country that is the reci- 
pient of the greatest proportion of the prosperity of other na- 
tions;" which "gets the greatest proportion of the benefit of 
every commercial relation entered into between it and every 
other portion of the world ; " which, in a word, has obtained a 
vantase-fiTOund from which it can assert its claim to the lion's 
share of every thing that is going, — a nation, too, which, by the 
declaration of the same witnesses, has attained to this proud 
predominance and peerless superiority by " her commercial and 
manufacturing industry," which could never have reached it, had 
it relied " on the produce of the soil," and whose population, 
had it been raised by any other means than commerce and ma- 
nufactures, "would have been a burden to the land, instead of 
an advantage," — here is this nation, I say, endeavoring to 
prove to the world that the system of domestic protection, under 
wdiich those manufactures have sprung up and that commerce 
spread abroad, is a false and foolish system I Having climbed 
to the very top itself, and placed itself on a platform of secu- 
rity and power, it is now proposing to throw down the ladder 
by which it mounted, in hopes, by its example, to induce others 
who are but half way up, or who, it may be, have just placed 
their feet upon the lowest round, to do likewise ! 

In these, and other passages of this report, too, we see the 
real origin of the recent free trade movement in England. It 
was in the fact that some of the continental countries were be- 
ginning to manufacture for themselves, and that our own coarse 
cotton fabrics were found competing successfully with those of 
the British in the Brazilian, South American, and East India 
markets. The testimony exhibits the apprehension of the Eng- 
lish manufacturers, that they may " one day be surpassed by 
the manufacturers of other countries." It expresses the opinion 
that, " if that day should ever arrive, the prosperity of the coun- 
try would recede much faster than it has ever gone forward." It 



THE POLICY OF DISCRBIINATING DUTIES. 327 

openly recommends the abolition of the corn laws, as " a means 
of diverting other countries from manufactm-es, and inducing 
them to take to agricultm-e instead ; " and it intimates the diffi- 
culty, while it implies the desirableness, of getting back to that 
palmy point at which the British nation stood at the end of the 
French war, when " they were the only manufacturers." 

And is this a policy which the gentleman from C4eorgia would 
seriously advise us to fall in with ? Would he have us grant 
to Great Britain, so far as we are concerned, this manufacturing 
monopoly which she seeks ; abandon the social advantages and 
national independence which result from a division of labor 
among our own population ; and rely henceforth for our support 
exclusively upon the produce of the soil ? Would this be, let 
me ask him, the surest way of conferring a benefit upon that 
great agricultural interest, which, I acknowledge, has claims upon 
our regard and protection second to those of no other interest 
whatever ? Would the farmers of our country thank us for adopt- 
ing a policy which should divert the whole people from all other 
pursuits, and " induce them to take to agriculture instead ? " 
Would such a course be the best mode of securing them a gene- 
rous, or even a just, reward for their labor ? And that, too, before 
the British ports have been thrown open to their raw produce ; 
and while a hundred nearer granaries stand ready to pour into 
those ports, whenever they are opened, the products of lands not 
less fertile, and of labor cheaper than our own ? Sir, it will be 
an evil day for the farmers of our country, when they follow the 
example of the planters, and place their exclusive reliance upon 
a foreign market. A steady foreign market they never will have. 
To say nothing of the competition they will encounter from the 
grain-growing countries of Europe, — how long would it be before 
the corn laws would be revived, even were they once removed! 
The object of their removal having been accomplished, — other 
countries having been "diverted from manufactures," and "in- 
duced to take to agriculture instead," — how long would it be 
before the landed interest of Great Britain would again be found 
vindicating its title to protection ! It would cost Great Britain 
nothing to reconstruct a sliding scale. It might be done in a day. 
But what would it not cost us to reconstruct our mills and looms, 



328 THE POLICY OF DISCRIMINATING DUTIES. 

to rebuild our furnaces, to reestablish our abandoned arts, and 
place them in the position of security which they now enjoy I 
And where would be our farmers meanwhile ? With an incal- 
culable surplus produce on hand, everybody raising and nobody 
consuming at home, and with no longer any outlet for disposing 
of it to advantage, or even disposing of it at all, abroad, — how 
much cause they would have for gratitude to those, who, under 
the profession of an exclusive friendship to their interests, had 
imposed upon the country a policy involving such consequences I 
It is treachery. Sir, to the agricultural population of the country, 
to flatter them with the idea of a secure and sufficient foreign 
market. Such a market they cannot have in war, and such a 
market they never will have in peace. Their true interest lies 
at home. 

But the gentleman from Georgia has discovered that the ma- 
nufacturers of the United States are doing a better business than 
any other class in the community already, and has cited figures 
from a book, to prove that many of them are making not less 
than eighty-eight per cent, per annum on their capital stock. 
Many of them, too, he tells us, are actually exporting their fabrics 
to foreign markets, where they enter into successful competition 
with the manufactures of Great Britain. With what face, then, 
can they ask for any greater protection than they now enjoy ? 

Well, now, Sir, these inordinate profits of our American manu- 
facturers are very easily explained away, — much more easily 
than I wish they were, for the sake of those whom they concern. 
In this eighty-eight per cent, per annum, nothing 'is allowed for 
the cost of the raw material, nothing for the wages of labor, nothing 
for the commissions of sale, nothing for the wear and tear of ma- 
chinery, nothing, in fact, for any of the thousand expenses, great 
and small, attending the management of such kinds of business. 
Everybody knows that a portion of the capital of manufactur- 
ing establishments is kept floating, as it is called, for these 
expenses, and is consequently found entering, as a large item, 
into the accounts both of the annual outlay and of the annual 
returns. The gross yield of these establishments, therefore, 
always exhibits the disproportion and excess to which the gentle- 
man has referred. I find the whole manufacturing capital of 



THE POLICY OF DISCRIMINATING DUTIES. 329 

Great Britain estimated at £217,773,872, and the gross annual 
yield at X259,412,702 ; while the entire agricultural capital of 
the same empire is stated to be .£3,258,910,810, and its annual 
yield only £538,536,201. Does the gentleman imagine, there- 
fore, that the British manufacturers really pocket one hundred 
and twenty per cent, per annum, or that they net nearly half as 
much annual income as the farmers of their own land, from a capi- 
tal only one fifteenth part as large ? 

Sir, the manufacturers of the United States are enjoying no 
such rich spoils. Some of them have been doing, I doubt not, 
a profitable business, and there may have been here and there a 
corporation which, from long experience, and fortunate invest- 
ment, and economical management, may have been able to 
declare great dividends. The most successful of them, however, 
(I speak of those in my own State,) have had their years of scar- 
city as well as their years of abundance ; and their average profits 
would probably not at all exceed a fair interest upon their outlay. 
As to the exportations which have been referred to, they have 
been mainly of a single class of goods — the coarse cottons, or 
domestics, as they are called — into which skill and labor enter 
least, and for the manufacture of which we enjoy peculiar ad- 
vantages in having an abundant supply of the raw material at our 
own doors. With these goods, it is true, we compete success- 
fully with Great Britain in the East India, Brazilian, and South 
American markets, — so successfully, that the British manufac- 
turers have even counterfeited our stamps, in order to undersell 
us with an inferior article. For this branch of manufacture, pro- 
tection is no longer needed. It has done its work ; and we point 
to this triumph of the past, as the best pledge of the achieve- 
ments it is destined to accomplish in the future, if not too 
summarily abandoned. 

The gentleman from Georgia seems not to remember, how- 
ever, that the success of American manufactures, hitherto, has 
been under a state of things which is now about to be materially 
altered. Under the operation of the compromise act, a large part 
of the protection which they now enjoy is to be taken off this very 
week, and another large part at the end of the next six months. 
This reduction will be on some articles three per cent., on others 

28* 



330 THE POLICY OF DISCRIMINATING DUTIES. 

six per cent., on others nine or ten per cent., and on almost all 
woollen articles eighteen per cent. Any success of our domestic 
manufactures in the past, therefore, affords no ground of assurance, 
and no ground of argument, for the future. Nor is it just to say, 
that the manufacturers are seeking an increased protection. At 
most, they are only remonstrating against a greatly reduced protec- 
tion. Sir, nothing is less true of the manufacturers in the part of 
the country from which I come, than that they seek any thing 
extreme or extravagant in the rate of duties, or are desirous of 
pressing a high tariff again upon the country. On the conti-ary, 
there is a uniform and universal disposition among those whose 
opinions I have been able to ascertain, to acquiesce in the most 
moderate system of discrimination which will enable them to 
stand up against an overwhelming competition from abroad. 
And they, one and all, are of opinion, that such a system may be 
arranged in a manner to promote the best interests of all the va- 
rious branches of the national industry, and without levying a 
dollar more of duties upon the people, than will be absolutely 
necessary to an economical support of the Government. 

But the honorable gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Rhett) 
seems to think that the idea of combining the objects of revenue 
and protection in a single system is altogether impracticable. 
He has told us that the two things are totally incompatible, and 
that where protection begins, revenue ends. Does the gentleman 
intend, by this remark, to assert, that the protecting tariffs, about 
which he and his friends have so long complained, and against 
which some of them proceeded to the length of preparing to 
take up arms, yielded no revenue to the country ? Or, will he 
take the other horn of the dilemma, and assert, that, having 
yielded, as they did, a most ample revenue to the government, 
they were not protecting tarifls ? Certainly, he cannot have 
employed this language in any sense which would involve him 
in such a contradiction. What, then, could have been his mean- 
ing? Did he only intend to argue, that inasmuch as complete 
protection could only be eflfected by prohibitory duties — from 
which, of course, no revenue could accrue — that, therefore, pro- 
tection and revenue were incompatible ? Why, Sir, it would be 
as fair for me to argue that, because the entire absence of pro- 



THE POLICY OP DISCRIMINATING DUTIES. 331 

tection could only be produced by perfect freedom, therefore the 
want of protection was incompatible with revenue. This is one 
of those instances where extremes meet. It is, undoubtedly, true 
that as you approximate closely towards duties of prohibition, 
you diminish the revenue from the article on which those duties 
are laid. But it is by no means sure, that a moderately high 
duty which will decrease importations to a very considerable 
extent, may not yield as large a revenue as a duty so low as not 
to diminish them at all. Take an easy illustration. Four mil- 
lion dollars' worth of cottons or wollens imported at a five per 
cent, duty, will yield a revenue of $ 200,000. But raise the duty 
to twenty per cent, and suppose that by so doing you exclude 
three fourths of the importation, the one million which is left 
will yield the same amount, — the increase of the duty making 
up for the diminution of the imports. 

The honorable gentleman, however, has in some degree ex- 
plained himself on this point, in a reply to a remark of my 
colleague, (Mr. Hudson,) and he must pardon me for saying, 
that he seems to have explained away the whole force of his 
paradox. I understood him to admit, that protecting duties did 
not immediately destroy revenue; that, on the contrary, they 
might increase it for one, two, three, or any number of years ; 
and that it was only when they had enabled the domestic manu- 
facturer or producer to supply the entire demand of the country, 
that they would put an end to it entirely. It was thus only an 
ultimate tendency of protecting duties to destroy revenue, and 
not their immediate result. Well, now. Sir, sufficient unto the 
day is the evil thereof. Let the gentleman join with us in esta- 
blishing a moderate system of protecting duties, graduated upon 
a revenue standard ; and whenever his theory is verified, and 
protection and revenue have been proved to be no longer com- 
patible, it will be early enough to assign this as a reason for 
supplying the necessities of the treasury in some other way. 

But I have alluded to this point principally for the sake of 
saying, that the gentleman has, in my judgment, placed an utterly 
unwarrantable construction on the phrase, now so much in vogue^ 
that duties should be laid primarily for the purposes of revenue, 
and that protection is only to be incidental to that object. His 



332 THE POLICY OF DISCRIMIXATING DUTIES. 

construction of this doctrine appears to be, that we are to apply 
the principle to each individual article of import, — selecting 
those articles, in the first place, on which to lay a duty, and lay- 
ing upon each of them precisely that rate of duty, which will 
yield the largest possible amount of revenue. This is what he 
seems to understand by looking primarily to revenue. And it is 
easy to perceive that the protection incidental to such a system 
of imposts might be very inconsiderable. Such a system would 
find its legitimate commencement in the imposition of the high- 
est duties on the most indispensable necessaries of life, .and 
more particularly on such of them as we were least able to 
produce or manufacture for ourselves ; and would resort to a duty 
upon luxuries, and upon articles entering into competition with 
our own labor, only when all other sources of additional revenue 
were exhausted. 

But in no such sense as this, I need hardly say. Sir, was the 
doctrine, that revenue was to be the primary object, and protec- 
tion only incidental, ever asserted or understood by the friends 
of a discriminating tariff. The whole sum and substance of this 
docti'ine, as avowed by them, is, that no more duties are to be 
collected in the aggregate than are necessary for purposes of 
revenue ; that we are not to accumulate a surplus in the Trea- 
sury by laying high duties merely for protection ; that, in a word, 
no more moneys are to be levied upon the people than are 
wanted for the support of the government. But having ascer- 
tained how much is wanted, having fixed the aggregate amount 
of revenue which it is necessary to raise, we contend for the 
right and for the obligation to raise it by such duties upon such 
articles as the great agricultural, manufacturing, or commercial 
interests of the country may render expedient. This was the 
doctrine so clearly and emphatically expressed by Mr. Webster, 
in the resolutions which he laid on the table of the Senate at 
the time of the adoption of the compromise act, and in explana- 
tion of the views with which he opposed that act. This is what 
I understand to be the doctrine of the present Secretary of the 
Treasury, where he says, " it is fully acknowledged that all duties 
should be laid with primary reference to revenue ; and it is 
admitted, without hesitation or reserve, that no more money 



THE POLICY OP DISCRIMINATING DUTIES. 333 

should be raised, under any pretence whatever, than such an 
amount as is necessary for an economical administration of the 
government." And this, too, is the only interpretation I can put 
upon these paragraphs of the President's message, — "In impos- 
ing duties, however, for the purposes of revenue, a right to dis- 
criminate as to the articles on which the duty shall be laid, as 
well as the amount, necessarily and most properly exists." — 
" So, also, the government may be justified in so discriminating 
by reference to other considerations of domestic policy connected 
with our manufactures. So long as the duties shall be laid with 
distinct reference to the wants of the Treasury, no well-founded 
objection can exist against them." Sir, I do not presume that 
the opinion of the President, whatever it may be, is to have any 
very controlling influence in this House. But if this language 
in his message was not used to mislead those to whom it was 
addressed, was not designed to give a promise to the ear to be 
broken to the hope, (and no one has ventured to intimate such 
an idea,) it must have been intended to express an opinion in 
favor of discrimination, within the standard of revenue, for the 
purposes of protection. 

The honorable gentleman from Virginia, indeed, (Mr. Jones,) 
informed us many days ago, that the President's whole life pre- 
cluded such a construction ; and the remark has been indorsed 
in a quarter from which an indorsement is supposed to come 
with something more than common authority, — the columns of 
the Madisonian. But I must insist that there is at least one 
passage in his life, and that of very recent occurrence, which the 
gentleman from Virginia could not have remembered, or could 
not have intended to include. 

During the late political campaign, Mr. Tyler was interrogated 
on this question of a tariff by Mr. William Robinson, Jr., of 
Pittsburg; and here is an extract from his reply : — 

"My opinions were fully expressed at St. Clairsville, and at Steubenville. At both 
places, in regard to the question, what are your opinions as to the tariff? I answered 
that I was in favor of sustaining the compromise bill. That it contained the principle 
of retroaction the moment the duty attained its minimum, which forced up the protec- 
tion, eo instanti, to what was equivalent to forty per cent. That the change which it 
effected in the plan of valuation and the mode of payment, was fully equal, in my 
view, to twenty-five or twenty per cent. ; and that, with a cessation of the war upon the 



33-4 THE POLICY OF DISCRIMINATING DUTIES. 

cuiToncy, which had paralyzed the industry of the country, I was sanguine in the hope 
and the belief that prosperity would be speedily restored." 

]Mr. Tyler was thus in favor of the compromise act, because it 
contained a retroactive principle which forced up the protection 
to what was equivalent to forty per cent. How, then, can any 
one say that his whole life has proved him to be an enemy to 
protection ? And let me add here, that, with this understanding 
of the compromise act, I am in favor of sustaining it also ; and 
if its friends will unite with us in so adjusting the cash duty 
and home valuation principles, to which Mr. Tyler referred, as to 
make them equivalent to forty per cent., nay, or even to a fairly 
imposed and fully collected thirty per cent, ad valorem, — I will 
venture to say, that it will soon cease to have any opponents. 

And now, Mr. Speaker, let me say a few words in conclusion 
of the whole matter, and with more immediate reference to the 
precise question upon which we are about to divide. The com- 
promise act, as it is called, is about reaching its final consumma- 
tion. Its ten years of transition state are about to expire. Its pro- 
posed experiment of a uniform twenty per cent, ad valorem system 
is about to commence. Sir, in the judgment of a large portion 
of the people of this country, that experiment is destined to 
prove a failure. Its failure, indeed, is regarded by many, as a 
foregone conclusion. They think there is evidence enough on 
that point already. In their judgment, it will inevitably fail, in 
the first place, to produce revenue enough to meet the economi- 
cal wants of the government, — using the word economy, not as 
some gentlemen in the course of this debate have used it, with 
mere reference to dollars and cents, but with relation to the honor, 
the dignity, the common defence and general welfare of the 
country. In their judgment, too, it will no less signally fail in 
exerting those favorable influences on all the great interests of 
American industry — commercial and agricultural, as well as 
manufacturing — which may be justly expected from the opera- 
tion of a permanent revenue policy. They believe that the pay- 
ment of duties in cash which it prescribes, will be a serious 
grievance to the mercantile community, without the intervention 
of what is known as the warehousing system. They believe 
that the ad valorem duties which it universally imposes, will not 



THE POLICY OF DISCRIMINATING DUTIES. 335 

only be a source of infinite fraud upon the Treasury, but will 
drive out the honest American merchant from his rightful busi- 
ness and occupation, and throw the whole importing trade of the 
country, where a large part of it has already gone, into the hands 
of the unscrupulous and fraudulent agents of foreign houses. 
They believe, too, that the home valuation principle which it 
contains, will be found utterly impracticable, and will involve 
our collection system, if attempted, in a state of things alike 
unequal and unconstitutional. They believe, still further, that 
the rate of duties which it establishes, and more especially if 
their payment in cash and their assessment upon a home valua- 
tion be abandoned, will prove entirely insufficient to protect the 
manufacturing and mechanical labor of the country from a ruin- 
ous competition with the cheaper labor of the old world, and 
that not merely our cotton-mills and woollen-mills will many of 
them be prostrated, but great numbers of the artisans and me- 
chanics of our humbler workshops will be thrown out of employ- 
ment. They believe that large quantities of ready made clothing, 
of hats, of boots and shoes, of ropes and cordage, of paper, of 
iron ware, and wooden ware, and glass ware, will be imported 
under a twenty per cent, duty, and will undersell in our own mar- 
kets the fabrics of our own industry. And let no gentleman be- 
lieve it impossible that some of our workshops should be trans- 
ferred to other lands. It has come to my knowledge, within a few 
days past, that an entire set of machinery for spinning and laying 
hemp, with the hands to manage it, has been very recently sent 
out from Massachusetts to Manilla, from which a liberal supply 
of ready-made rope may soon be expected, — a fact, which, per- 
haps, may prove interesting to the hemp-growers in Kentucky 
and elsewhere. But, still again, they believe that the fresh 
flood of importations which such a system of revenue will throw 
in upon us, will not only distress and prostrate much of our 
manufacturing industry, but will involve the agriculture of the 
nation equally in its disastrous results, both by diminishing the 
power of paying for its products in the home market, and by 
compelling it to reduce the price of those products to an amount, 
at which they can be used to advantage in balancing the account 
of the country in the foreign market. They believe, yet further. 



336 THE POLICY OF DISCRIMINATING DLTIES. 

that the currency of the Union will partake largely of the com- 
mon calamity ; that our specie will be drawn away from us in 
ruinous amounts to pay for our excessive importations ; and that 
the long desired day of return to a sound state of things will be 
still further postponed. 

It would be easy, Mr. Speaker, to enlarge on each of these 
points of objection to the anticipated operation of the compro- 
mise act. But I have detained the House too long already, and 
other opportunities will occur. All I will add now is, that such 
being the opinion of great numbers of persons in all parts of the 
country, it is but reasonable, it is but just, that the subject should 
be deliberately investigated in all its bearings. We seek no ex- 
clusive hearing for the manufacturing interests. We desire that 
the labor of the country should be looked to, in all its branches. 
We believe that the existing revenue system, if adhered to, will 
be disastrous to all alike ; and we desire that its operations 
should be examined in reference to all alike. The House will 
bear me witness that the resolution of inquiry introduced by me 
at the last session, and afterwards sanctioned by the Committee 
on Commerce, was thus broad, comprehensive, and general in its 
terms. I heartily wish that resolution could have been adopted, 
and that the fruits of the investigation it proposed were now be- 
fore us. We should not, in such case, be engaged in disputing 
on such a bai-ren and bootless issue as the present. It was a 
measure which commended itself to the intelligent approbation of 
the whole community, and nothing but a most groundless jea- 
lousy of its object could have occasioned its defeat. I pray 
gentlemen to join in repairing the consequences of that defeat 
as far as we can. I pray them not to deny to this subject of 
the tariff a fair and full hearing at the present session, and not 
to send it to any committee who will be prevented, either by 
occupation or inclination, and much less by instruction, from at- 
tending to it thoroughly. 

Sir, the strongest objection I have to the amendment and the 
instructions now under consideration is, that they seem to be 
proposed and pressed with a view to foreclose all further consi- 
deration or agitation of this subject of protection. They seem 
to have had their origin in something of the same design to de- 



THE POLICY OP DISCRIMIISrATING DUTIES. 337 

prive the citizens of the free States of a hearing in relation to 
what may be called their own peculiar institutions, which has 
already deprived them of a hearing in regard to the peculiar in- 
stitutions of the Southern States. Protection is an exploded 
term, says one. It is unconstitutional, and ought not to be so 
much as named in this House, says another. Abolish the Com- 
mittee on Manufactures, says a third. Instruct the Committee 
of Ways and Means, says a fourth, to have no reference to the 
industry of the country. Sir, I implore gentlemen to take no 
such proscriptive course. I am not accustomed to deal in warn- 
ings. We have had quite too many of them from other quarters. 
But I tell them, that the excitement produced by your twenty- 
first rule, deep and pervading as it has been in many parts of 
the country, — when compared with that which would be pro- 
duced by an arbitrary effort to rule this subject of discrimination 
in favor of our own labor out of the House, — would be as the 
light murmuring of the distant wind, compared with the deep- 
toned thunder of the raging storm. The whole country has 
looked forward to this tenth year of the compromise act, as the 
time when the tariff was to be revised, as the time when the 
seal of silence which that act imposed was to be taken off, as 
the time when all who were interested in its provisions, were 
once more to be fairly and fully heard. I pray the House to 
grant that full and fair hearing by a Committee appropriate to 
the purpose. 

There would be work enough, indeed, in such an investigation, 
for half a dozen Committees, and I would not object, myself, to 
having the labor thus distributed. The Committee on Ways and 
Means might examine the revenue system of the country, for in- 
stance, simply with reference to the finances. The Committee 
on Agriculture might investigate its operation on the farming 
and planting interests, the corn, and wheat, the cotton, tobacco, 
and rice interests. The Committee on Commerce might inquire 
into its effects upon the commercial and navigating interests of 
the nation, and might well extend their examination into the in- 
fluence of those reciprocity treaties, as they are called, which are 
giving such an advantage to the shipping of foreign countries 
in our ports; — that West India Treaty of Mr. Van Buren's, 

29 



338 THE POLICY OF DISCRIMINATING DUTIES. 

more particularly, which, during the last ten or twelve years, 
has increased the British tonnage clearing from our ports for the 
British colonies and provinces, more than twentyfold, while it 
has increased the American tonnage clearing from the same ports 
less than threefold ; which has increased the British tonnage 
clearing for all foreign ports from our own ports more than five- 
fold, while it has increased the American tonnage less than two- 
fold; and which has already reduced the American tonnage 
entering our ports direct from the British West Indies more than 
one half. The Committee on Manufactures might, then, con- 
fine their attention to the condition of our manufactures and 
mechanic arts, and to the effect which is likely to be produced 
upon them by the ultimate operation of the compromise act. 
We should thus have a series of reports of great interest and 
value, embracing different views of the same general subject, 
and affording a basis for sound, intelligent, and impartial legis- 
lation. 

The paragraphs of the President's message now under con- 
sideration relate, however, solely to discrimination in reference to 
manufactures. Let them go, then, to the Committee on Manu- 
factures. Why should they not ? Is that Committee com- 
posed of gentlemen friendly to a protecting policy ? So much 
the more reason for such a reference. It is the parliamentary 
right of every interest to be heard through a Committee of its 
friends. What harm can result from such a course ? The mere 
reference will commit the House to no particular course of ac- 
tion. The report of the Committee will be obligatory upon 
nobody. You have committed the President's plan of finance 
to those who are supposed to be favorable to the scheme ; but 
you can crush the project, when it comes back, if you desire to 
do so, as easily as if you had referred it originally to its known 
opponents. So it will be with a protecting tariff, if one should 
be reported. If you are resolved to strike down the Labor of 
our own land, strike it down ; but, in the name of all that is just 
and equitable, hear, hear, before you strike, and hear fairly, deli- 
berately, and fully. 



NOTE. 



The petition of Paul Pritcliard, which was among the first presented to the 
Congress of the United States, after the adoption of the Constitution, and 
which is alluded to on page 311, will not be read without interest. 

April 13, 1789. 

TO THE HOX. SPEAKER AXD MEMBERS OP THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTA- 
TIVES IN THE CONGRESS OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA : 

The petition of the Shipwrights of the State of South Carolina humbly 
showeth : 

That your petitioners reflect with pleasure that the Constitution of the United 
States gives the exclusive right of forming treaties and regulating commerce to 
the General Government of the Union, which can alone equally, safely, and 
effectually, exercise the same. 

From the diminished state of ship-building In America, and the ruinous re- 
strictions to which our vessels are subject In foreign ports ; from the distressed 
condition of our commerce, languishing under the most disgraceful inequalities, 
its benefits transferred from our own citizens to strangers, who do not, nor ever 
will, feel those attachments which can alone render a mercantile Interest useful 
to the country ; and above all, mortified at the daily humiliating sight of our 
valuable staples lading the vessels and enriching the merchants of Powers who 
neither have treaties with us nor are friendly to our commerce ; with deference 
and respect, your petitioners humbly entreat the early and earnest attention of 
your honorable House to these Important considerations. 

Enjoying a country which possesses every thing to make Its commerce flou- 
rishing and its reputation respectable, there wanted but a supreme energetic sys- 
tem, capable of uniting Its efforts and drawing its resources to a point, to render 
ns a great and happy people. This system we trust the wisdom of the General 
Convention has produced, and the virtue of the people confirmed. Under your 
able and upright administration of the ample powers it contains, we look for- 
ward with pleasing hopes to the period when we shall once more see public 



340 NOTE. 

credit firmly establisliod, private rights secured, and our citizens enjoying the 
blessings of a mild and active government. 

No more, we trust, shall we lament our trade almost wholly in the possession 
of foreigners ; our vessels excluded from the ports of some nations, and fettered 
with restrictions in others ; or materials, the produce of our country, which 
should be retained for our own use, exported, and increase the maritime conse- 
quence of other powers. 

To the wisdom of the General Legislature we look up for a correction of these 
public evils. The formation of treaties and the regulation of commerce are 
questions which can be committed with safety to the enlightened councils of the 
Union alone ; it would be as unnecessary, as it would be unbecoming, in us to 
presume to point out the measures proper to be adopted. It is sufficient for us 
to join with our Northern brethren in asserting, that we have most severely felt 
the want of such a navigation act as will place our vessels upon an equality with 
other nations. To you, who are the only proper guardians of our general rights, 
We resort with confidence for redress, assured that no means will be left unat- 
tempted, to remedy these evils, and to render us respectable abroad and at 
home. 

And your petitioners, as in duty bound, will ever pray. 

Signed, in the city of Charleston, this 2d day of April, A. D. 1789, by order 
of the shipwrights. 

Paul Pritchard, ^ 

James George, v Committee. 

David Hamilton, ) 

It was in response to a similar movement among the ship-owners and ship- 
builders in Boston, which seemed to aim at the exclusive protection of the navi- 
gating interests, that the Boston mechanics, at the head of whom was Paul Re- 
vere, put the following well-remembered interrogatory : — " "What difference 
does it make to us, whether hats, shoes, boots, shirts, handkerchiefs, tin ware, 
brass ware, cutlery, and every other article, come in British ships, or come in 
your ships ; since, in whatever ships they come, they take away our means of 
living ? " 



THE IMPRISONMENT 



OF 



FREE COLOEED SEAMEN. 

A REPOKT MADE TO THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES OF THE UNITED 

STATES, JANUARY 20, 1843. 



The Committee on Commerce, to whom was referred the 
memorial of Benjamin Rich and others, submit the subjoined 
report : 

The memorial was commended to the most attentive and re- 
spectful consideration of the committee, as well by the subject- 
matter to which it relates, as by the character of those from 
whom it comes. 

It is signed by more than one hundred and fifty citizens of 
Boston, in the State of Massachusetts, a large part of whom are 
very deeply interested in the commerce and navigation of the 
country, others of whom are eminently distinguished in legal, 
scientific, or literary pursuits, and all of whom are quite beyond 
the reach of a suspicion, that they would approach the Legis- 
lature of the nation in any cause, in which they did not 
sincerely believe that important principles or valuable interests 
were involved. Probably no paper was ever addressed to the 
Congress of the United States, which represented more of the 
intelligence, virtue, patriotism, and property also, of the metro- 
polis of New England. In attestation of this statement, the 
memorial, with its signatures, is appended to this report. 

The memorialists appear in the character of citizens of the 
United States, adding, also, that many of them are masters and 
owners of vessels. 

29* 



342 THE IMPRISONMENT OF FREE COLORED SEAMEN. 

They set forth, that on board the large number of Massachu- 
setts vessels which are accustomed to touch at the Southern 
ports of this Union, it is frequently necessary to employ free 
persons of color. They proceed to state, that it often happens, 
at the ports of Charleston, Savannah, Mobile, and New Orleans, 
that these free persons of color are taken from the vessels to 
which they belong, thrown into prison, and there detained at 
their own expense. They submit, that such proceedings are 
greatly to the prejudice and detriment of their interests, and of 
the commerce of the nation. And they conclude by praying, 
that relief may be granted to them, and that the privileges of 
citizenship, secured by the Constitution of the United States, 
may be rendered effectual in their behalf. 

The committee regret to say, that the facts which are set forth 
in the memorial, have been of too frequent and too notorious 
occurrence to admit of any denial or doubt. They regret still 
more to add, that the acts of violence complained of by the me- 
morialists, have owed their occurrence, not to any temporary 
excitement or any local outbreak, but to the deliberately enacted 
laws of the States in whose ports they have been perpetrated. 
It is known to every one, that laws, making it the imperative 
duty of the local magistrates to search for, arrest, and imprison, 
any free persons of color belonging to the crews of vessels which 
may enter their harbors, have existed, and have often been most 
oppressively executed, during a long series of years, in some of 
the Southern States of this Union. 

The existence of such a law in the State of South Carolina 
gave occasion, almost twenty years ago, to a formal remon- 
strance to our National Executive, on the part of the Government 
of Great Britain, as being in direct conflict with the rights which 
had been stipulated to British commerce by the most solemn 
treaties. An interesting correspondence, relating to this remon- 
strance, was communicated to this House during the last session 
of Congress, and is annexed to this report, for more convenient 
reference. 

Laws of the same character have been more recently enacted 
in other States. Within the past year only, such a law has been 
introduced into the code of Louisiana, whether as an original 



THE IMPRISONMENT OF FREE COLORED SEAMEN. 343 

enactment on the subject, or as a revised statute, the committee 
have not thought it important to inquire. 

The committee have no hesitation in agreeing with the memo- 
rialists, that the acts of which they complain, are violations of 
the privileges of citizenship guaranteed by the Constitution of 
the United States. The Constitution of the United States ex- 
pressly provides, (art. 4, sec. 2,) that " citizens of each State 
shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities of citizens in 
the several States." Now, it is well understood that some of 
the States of this Union recognize no distinction of color in rela- 
tion to citizenship. Their citizens are all free ; their freemen all 
citizens. In Massachusetts, certainly — the State from which this 
memorial emanates — the colored man has enjoyed the full and 
equal privileges of citizenship since the last remnant of slavery 
was abolished within her borders by the constitution of 1780, 
nine years before the adoption of the Constitution of the United 
States. The Constitution of the United States, therefore, at its 
adoption, found the colored man of Massachusetts a citizen of 
Massachusetts, and entitled him, as such, to all the privileges 
and immunities of a citizen in the several States. And of these 
privileges and immunities, the acts set forth in the memorial 
constitute a plain and palpable violation. 

It matters not to this argument, in the opinion of the commit- 
tee, what may be the precise interpretation given to this clause 
of the Constitution. However extended or however limited may 
be the privileges and immunities which it secm'es, the citizens of 
each State are entitled to them equally, without discrimination 
of color or condition ; and unless it is maintained that the citi- 
zens of Massachusetts generally, may be made subject to seizure 
and imprisonment for entering these Southern ports in the pro- 
secution of their rightful business, whenever the Legislatures of 
South Carolina, or Louisiana, or Alabama, or Georgia, may see 
fit to enact laws to that effect, it is impossible to perceive upon 
what principle the acts in question can be reconciled with this 
constitutional provision. 

The State laws under which these acts are committed, are 
also, in the judgment of the committee, in direct contravention 
of another provision of the Constitution of the United States. 



344 THE IMPRISONMENT OF FREE COLORED SEAMEN. 

The Constitution of the United States gives the power to Con- 
gress "to regulate commerce with foreign nations and among 
the several States." This power is, from its very nature, a para- 
mount and exclusive power, and has always been so considered 
and so construed. There is no analogy between this power of 
regulating commerce and most of the other powers which have 
been granted to the General Government. The power to regu- 
late admits of no partition. It excludes the idea of all concurrent, 
as well as of all conflicting, action. It can be exercised but by 
one authority. Regulation may be as much disturbed and 
deranged, by restraining what is designed to be left free, as by 
licensing what is designed to be restrained. The grant necessa- 
rily carries with it the control of the whole subject, leaving 
nothing in reference to it for the States to act upon. But it is 
too obvious to require, or even bear, an argument, that the laws 
in question, imposing severe penalties, as they do, upon certain 
classes of seamen for entering certain ports, are infringements, 
by the States in which they have been enacted, upon this exclu- 
sive authority of the General Government. 

Nor can the States which have enacted these laws escape, in 
the judgment of the committee, from the charge of having vio- 
lated still another provision of the Federal Constitution. The 
sixth article of that instrument declares, that " all treaties made, 
or which shall be made, under the authority of the United 
States, shall be a part of the supreme law of the land." But 
the provisions of the laws in question, wherever they are appli- 
cable to the crews of foreign vessels, are in direct conflict with 
most, if not with all, of the commercial treaties which have been 
made by the United States with foreign nations. Certainly, no 
treaty of commerce between the United States and any other 
nation is known to the committee, which contains any restric- 
tions as to the color of the crews by which that commerce is to 
be carried on. 

It seems to be understood, that the application of these laws 
to foreign vessels has of late years been suspended. This consi- 
deration, however, if true, cannot make the laws themselves less 
obnoxious to constitutional objections; still less can it render 
them more acceptable to our own citizens. The idea that 



THE IMPRISONMENT OF FREE COLORED SEAMEN. 345 

foreign seamen are treated with greater clemency in our own 
ports than native American seamen, can only serve, on the con- 
trary, to increase the impatience, and aggravate the odium, with 
which such laws are justly regarded. 

The committee are aware that the laws in question have 
sometimes been vindicated upon considerations of domestic po- 
lice ; and they have no disposition to deny, that the general police 
power belonging to the States, by virtue of their general sove- 
reignty, may justify them in making police regulations even in 
relations to matters over which an exclusive control is constitu- 
tionally vested in the National Government. 

But the committee utterly deny that provisions like these can 
be brought within the legitimate purview of the police power. 
That American or foreign seamen, charged with no crime, and 
infected with no contagion, should be searched for on board the 
vessels to which they belong ; should be seized while in the dis- 
charge of their duties, or, it may be, while asleep in their berths ; 
should be dragged on shore and incarcerated, without any other 
examination than an examination of their skins ; and should be 
rendered liable, in certain contingencies over which they may 
have no possible control, to be subjected to the ignominy and 
agony of the lash, and even to the infinitely more ignominious 
and agonizing fate of being sold into slavery for life, and all for 
purposes of police, — is an idea too monstrous to be entertained 
for a moment. It would seem almost a mockery to allude to the 
subject of police regulations in connection with such acts of vio- 
lence. 

It may be difficult, perhaps, to assign the precise limits to 
which this police power of the States may extend. There is one 
limit to it, however, about which the committee conceive there 
can be no question. The police power of the States can never 
be permitted to abrogate the constitutional privileges of a whole 
class of citizens, upon grounds, not of any temporary moral or 
physical condition, but of distinctions which originate in their 
birth, and which are as permanent as their being. Or, to use still 
more general terms, the police power of the States can never 
justify enactments or regulations, which are in direct, positive, 
and permanent conflict with express provisions or fundamental 
principles of the national compact. 



846 THE IMPRISONMENT OF FREE COLORED SEAMEN. 

This would seem to be the doctrine laid down by the Supreme 
Court of the United States in the recent case of Prigg versus the 
Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. The Court having in that 
case decided that " the power of legislation in relation to fugi- 
tives from labor is exclusive in the national government," seem 
to have anticipated that a necessity for State interference might 
arise, in reference to the peace and security of the Common- 
wealth in which such fugitives might take refuge. They accord- 
ingly admit, that the general police power of the States would 
reach to such a case ; but they declare that any such regulations 
of police " can never be permitted to interfere with, or obstruct, 
the just rights of the owner to reclaim his slave, derived from 
the Constitution of the United States." 

Now, if such a limitation be applicable to the third paragraph 
of the second section of the fourth article of the Constitution, 
it certainly cannot be less applicable to the first paragraph of the 
same section of the same article. If the police power of a 
State cannot be permitted to divest a master of his constitutional 
right over his slave, as secured by one of these provisions, as 
little can it be suffered to divest a free citizen of his constitu- 
tional right over himself, his own actions, and his own motions, 
as guaranteed by the other. If, on the contrary, this police 
power can make a citizen no citizen in one State, it is hard to 
perceive why it cannot make a slave no slave in another State. 

There is an .act on the statute book of the United States 
which may seem to have some reference to the subject under 
consideration. It bears date February 28, 1803, and contains 
the following, among other provisions : — 

" No master or captain of any ship or vessel, or any other 
person, shall import or bring, or cause to be imported or brought, 
any negro, mulatto, or other person of color, not being a native, 
a citizen, or registered seaman of the United States, or seamen 
natives of countries beyond the Cape of Good Hope, into any 
port or place of the United States, which port or place shall be 
situated in any State, which, by law, has prohibited, or shall 
prohibit, the admission or importation of such negro, mulatto, 
or other person of color. 

" No ship or vessel arriving in any of the said ports or places 



THE IMPRISONMENT OP FREE COLORED SEAMEN. 347 

of the United States, and having on board any negro, mulatto, 
or other person of color, not being a native, a citizen, or regis- 
tered seaman of the United States, or seamen natives of coun- 
tries beyond the Cape of Good Hope, as aforesaid, shall be 
admitted to an entry." 

The act proceeds to prescribe penalties for the violation of 
these provisions, and to make it the duty of the officers of the 
revenue of the United States to notice, and be governed by, the 
provisions of the laws, then existing, of the several States, pro- 
hibiting the admission or importation of any negro, mulatto, or 
other person of color, as aforesaid. 

A very brief examination of this act will be sufficient, in the 
judgment of the committee, to show that it has little, if any, 
bearing upon the grievances complained of by the memorialists 
or upon the State laws which are the subject of this report. 
Indeed, the committee would hardly have thought it necessary 
to allude to the act, had it not been relied on to some extent by 
a late Attorney-General of the United States, (Mr. Berrien,) 
whose opinion is annexed to the report of the minority, to justify 
the operation of the law of South Carolina in the case of Daniel 
Fraser, a British sailor, born in the British West Indies. 

The act of 1803 was evidently passed in reference to that 
provision of the Constitution of the United States which de- 
clares, " that the migration or importation of such persons as 
any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit shall 
not be prohibited by Congress prior to the year 1808." This 
provision of the Constitution, it is well understood, had imme- 
diate relation to the slave trade, and was designed to secure to 
the several States of the Union, until the year 1808, the right 
to admit within their limits, or to exclude altogether, at their 
own discretion, the unfortunate subjects of this infamous traffic. 
The act of 1803 was obviously intended to aid those States, 
which might prohibit the admission of such persons, in the 
enforcement of such prohibitions. Congress, however, having 
taken this whole subject into its own hands at the earfiest 
moment at which the Constitution empowered it to do so, and 
having enacted laws, coextensive with the whole country, in 
relation to the introduction of such persons into the United 



348 THE IMPRISONMENT OF FREE COLORED SEAMEN. 

States, the reasons of the act of 1803 would seem to have 
wholly ceased ; and it may well be questioned whether the act 
itself, though never formally repealed, has not ceased also. The 
committee incline to the opinion that it is a mere dead letter 
upon the statute book. 

If, however, it is supposed to have any thing of vitality left, 
it must be observed that it relates exclusively to vessels arriving 
from foreign lands. This is evident, both from the general 
phraseology of the act, and from the particular penalty pre- 
scribed for its violation. The vessel, it is declared, shall not be 
admitted to " entry." But vessels bound to or from one State 
cannot constitutionally be required to "enter" in another. The 
act, moreover, expressly excepts from the operation of its pro- 
visions all colored persons who are " natives, citizens, or registered 
seamen of the United States, or seamen natives of countries 
beyond the Cape of Good Hope." In relation to all colored 
persons thus excepted, therefore, the act of 1803 contains no 
prohibition on the part of the general government, and author- 
izes none on the part of any State ; nor are any of its provisions 
applicable to vessels of the United States passing from port to 
port. The direct implication of the act, on the contrary, clearly 
is, that all colored persons included in the terms of the exception, 
shall have free and unmolested ingress into all the ports of this 
Union, and that our own vessels shall pass along from port to 
port with such crews, so far as color is concerned, as their masters 
and owners may see fit to employ. If, then, the act of 1803 be 
still in force, and if this be its just construction, no other evidence 
can be required, that the laws of tlie Southern States complained 
of by the memorialists, are in direct collision with a law of the 
United States. 

There is one view in which the law of 1803 is certainly not 
without importance. There is one point on which, even if dead, 
it still speaks. The distinct recognition which it contains, of 
the idea that a negro, mulatto, or other colored person, may be 
a " citizen " of the United States, is sufficient to prove the 
opinion which was entertained by the Congress of 1803, upon 
a doctrine which of late years has so often been denied. 

The Committee do not deem it necessary to dwell longer on 



THE IMPRISONMENT OF FREE COLORED SEAMEN. 349 

the constitutional character of the proceedings which the memo- 
rial sets forth, or of the State laws by which they are sanctioned. 
They content themselves with appending, as a part of their 
report, an opinion on the subject, officially communicated to the 
Secretary of State, by the late William Wirt, while Attorney- 
General of the United States, in the year 1824 ; and also an 
opinion of the late Mr. Justice Johnson, of the Supreme Court 
of the United States, delivered in a case arising under these 
laws in Charleston, South Carolina, in the year 1823. This lat- 
ter opinion, for which a call upon the Executive was made by 
this House at the last session of Congress, contains a compre- 
hensive and conclusive view of the whole subject, and, as the 
production of a native South Carolinian, can hardly be subject 
to the imputation of local prejudice. 

That the operation of these laws is oppressive upon the 
memorialists, and greatly injurious to the general interests of 
commerce, the committee can see no reason and no room to 
doubt. For some of the stations on board both of our sailing 
vessels and steamboats, colored mariners are thought to possess 
peculiar qualifications. They are very generally employed as 
firemen, laborers, stewards, and cooks. The memorialists state 
that it is frequently necessary to employ them. The abduction 
of persons so employed immediately on the arrival of a vessel 
in port, and their detention at a heavy expense until the very 
moment of its departure, cannot be less an injury to their em- 
ployers than it is an outrage on themselves. The opinion of Mr. 
Justice Johnson will be found to make mention of a case, in 
which, under the operation of these laws, " not a single man 
was left on board the vessel to guard her in the captain's 
absence I " 

The committee are of opinion, that the memorialists are 
entitled to the relief for which they pray, and that important 
commercial interests, as well as the highest constitutional 
principles, call for the repeal of the laws in question. Con- 
gress, however, seems to have no means of affording such relief, 
or of effecting such a repeal. The Judiciary alone can give 
relief from the oppression of these laws while they exist, and 
the States which enacted them are alone competent to strike 

30 



350 THE IMPRISONMENT OF FREE COLORED SEAMEN. 

them from their statute books. The committee cannot conclude 
this report, however, without putting the opinions at which they 
have arrived into a shape, in which they may receive the ratifica- 
tion and adoption of the House ; trusting that such an expres- 
sion of them may not be without influence in procuring for the 
memorialists, and still more for the oppressed and injured seamen 
in their employ, the redress which they rightfully demand. 

They accordingly submit the following Resolutions : 

Resolved, That the seizure and imprisonment, in any port of 
this Union, of free colored seamen, citizens of any of the States, 
and against whom there is no charge but that of entering said 
port in the prosecution of their rightful business, is a violation 
of the privileges of citizenship guaranteed by the second section 
of the fourth article of the Constitution of the United States. 

Resolved, That the seizure and imprisonment, in any port of 
this Union, of free colored seamen, on board of foreign vessels, 
against whom there is no charge but that of entering said port 
in the course of their lawful business, is a breach of the comity 
of nations, is incompatible with the rights of all nations in amity 
with the United States, and, in relation to nations with whom 
the United States have formed commercial conventions, is a 
violation of the sixth article of the Federal Constitution, which 
declares that treaties are a part of the supreme law of the land. 

Resolved, That any State laws, by which certain classes of 
seamen are prohibited from entering certain ports of this Union, 
in the prosecution of their rightful business, are in contravention 
of the paramount and exclusive power of the general government 
to regulate commerce. 

Resolved, That the police power of the States can justify no 
enactments or regulations, which are in direct, positive, and per- 
manent conflict with express provisions or fundamental princi- 
ples of the national compact. 



NOTE. 



TO THE HOXORABLE THE SENATE AND HOUSE OF REPRESEXTATIVES OF 
THE UNITED STATES, IN CONGRESS ASSEMBLED : 

Your petitioners, citizens of the United States, and some of them owners and 
masters of vessels, 

Respectfully represent, — 

That on board of that large number of vessels accustomed to touch at the 
ports of Charleston, Savannah, Mobile, and New Orleans, it is frequently neces- 
sary to employ free persons of color : 

And whereas it frequently happens that such crews are taken from the vessels, 
thrown into prison, and there detained at their own expense, greatly to the pre- 
judice and detriment of their interest, and of the commerce of these States : 

They pray your honorable body to grant them relief, and render eiFectual in 
their behalf the privileges of citizenship secured by the Constitution of the 
United States. 

And, as in dutj- bound, will ever pray. 



Benjamin Rich 
Henry Oxnard 
Samuel Appleton 
J. Thomas Stevenson 
Benjamin Bangs 
Daniel P. Parker 
Theodore Chase 
Henry G. Rice 
S. C. Gray 
Abbott Lawrence 
Thomas Lamb 
John D. Bates 
John Dorr 
William Appleton 
Paschal P. Pope 
J. Ingersoll Bowditch 
Magoun & Sou 
J. J. Dixweli 
S- Austin, Jr. 



James S. Amory 
Francis J. Oliver 
Samuel May 
G. M. Thatcher 
Ozias Goodwin 
R. B. Forbes 
Samuel Whitwell 
James Savage 
Caleb Loring 
Thomas Motley 
Samuel A. Dorr 
William Ropes 
B. T. Reed 
C J. Everett 
Robert G. Shaw 
Robert B. Williams 
George Hallet 
John G. Nazro 
Phineas Sprague 



Samuel T. Armstrong 
James Dennie 
Henry J. Nazro 
Henry J. Oliver 
Joshua Crane 
Bramhall & Howe 
C. Wilkins & Co. 
George Thatcher & Co. 
Edward Oakes 
Charles C Bowman 
John J. Eaton 
Henderson Inches, Jr. 
M. Bi'immer 
T. M. J. Dehon 
Stephen Grover 
Thomas B. Curtis 
Joseph Ballister & Co. 
Josiah Bradlee & Co. 
James Parker 



352 



NOTE. 



Henry Lee 
Peter R. Dalton 
B. C. Clarke & Co. 

A. "W. Thaxter, Jr. 
Barnard, Adams, & Co. 
James Huckins 
Taplej- & Crane 
Billings & Bailey 

J. P. Townsend & Co. 
Samuel Weltch 
George Williams 
Cyi-us Buttrick 
Frederick A. Sumner 
Jos. Hunnewell & Sons 
N. A. Thompson & Co. 
Isaac C. Hall 
Howes & Co. 
Charles G. Loring 
Franklin Dexter 
Charles P. Curtis 

B. R. Curtis 
F. C. Loring 
George T. Curtis 
Thomas B. Pope 
John R. Adan 
John S. Eldridge 
Joseph Balch 
Benjamin Guild 
Nath. Meriam 
Lemuel Pope 

C. Curtis 
Edward S. Tobey 
K. C. Mackay 



John R. Brewer 

Lsaiah Bangs 

John Q. A. Williams 

Rice & Thaxter 

Charles J. Morrill 

Samuel Blake 

Albert A. Bent 

E. Williams, Jr. 

Henry W. Pickering 

Richard W. Shapleigh 

W. Getting 

William Worthington & Co. 

Victor Constant 

William Rollins 

Cobb & Winslow 

William Sturgis 

George R. Minot 

J. M. Forbes 

Alfred C Hersey 

William Perkins 

Robert G. Shaw, Jr. 

E. Weston & Sons 

Winsor & Townsend 

Frothingham & Bradlee 

Stephen Tilton & Co. 

S. R. Allen 

John 0. B. Merrit 

Robert Vinal 

Gregerson & Cox 



Reed & Howe 
Robert Day 
Lot Day 
Jackson Riggs 



C. Allen Browne 
R. Lincoln & Co. 
William H. Prentice 
Benjamin Rand 
W. Minot 
Edward G. Loring 
W. W. Story 
Charles Henry Parker 
George William Bond 
Richard Robins 
Henry Hall 
James K. Mills 
Edm. D wight 
P. T. Jackson 
J. H. Wolcott 

A. Gk Lombard & Co. 
T. H. Perkins 

John C. Gray 
Amos La^nrence 
S. Bartlett 

B. A. Gould 
Benjamin C. White 
W. H. Gardiner 
Charles Jackson 
William Prescott 
William H. Prescott 
N. I. Bowditch 
Edward Pickering 
George Morey 

W. R. P. Washburn 
A. A. Dame 
John Pickering. 



THE 



SAFE KEEPING OF THE PUELIC MONEYS. 

A SPEECH DELIVERED IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES OF THE UNI- 
TED STATES, JANUARY 25, 1843. 



It is with no little reluctance, Mr. Speaker, that I enter into 
this debate. There is a well-remembered proverb of Solomon, 
that " from the fulness of the heart the mouth speaketh." I con- 
fess. Sir, that I have no fulness of the heart to speak from, in 
relation to the questions now before us. The whole subject of 
the currency has been so perplexed and embarrassed, by the 
deplorable collisions which have occurred between the President 
of the United States and the Congress of the United States, 
that no man can approach it without something of repugnance 
and aversion. 

In reference to this subject of the currency, indeed, we have 
been tossed to and fro on the waves of party contention for 
almost ten years. A year or two since we were flattered with 
the belief that we were coming at last to port ; but the objects 
which we took for land, and which were eagerly and joyously 
hailed as such from the mast-head, turned out to be only fresh 
reefs of rock across our course ; and we seem to be now as far 
as ever, or even farther than ever, from the haven where we 
would be. In the mean time, the subject itself, as a matter of 
public discussion, has become " as stale as the remainder biscuit 
after a voyage." 

Questions, however, seem likely to be taken before this report 
and resolution are disposed of, upon which any vote that one 
may give, will be so exceedingly liable to misconstruction, that 
I cannot consent to forego some explanation of my views. 

30* 



354 THE SAFE KEEPINO OF THE PUBLIC MONEYS. 

Repeated challenges have been heard in this hall, for one man 
to rise in his place and say that he was in favor of adopting the 
Exchequer plan as originally presented to us by the President of 
the United States. I am not about to respond to these challenges, 
or to take up the gauntlet which has thus been thrown down. 
But I greatly doubt both the policy and the propriety of passing 
the pending resolution, and if compelled to give a vote on it at 
all, that vote will be in the negative. 

Before proceeding, however, to any remarks upon the resolu- 
tion itself, or upon the report by which it is accompanied, I desire 
to present some general views on the subject-matter involved in 
them. 

And, in the first place, Sir, I wish to express the strong sense 
which I entertain of the obligation which is resting upon the 
Congress of the United States to make provision, by law, in 
some form or other, and without further delay, for the collection, 
custody, and disbursement of the public moneys. How is it 
with these moneys now? Who knows where they are to-day, 
or where they will be to-morrow ? Who knows how they are 
collected, how they are kept, how they are disbursed? Who 
does not know that they are collected, kept, and disbursed, under 
the almost entirely unregulated and discretionary authority of 
the Executive ? There is a section or two of an old law of 1789, 
and there is an amendatory act of 1822, — both of them exceed- 
ingly loose in their language and indefinite in their import; and 
there is also the resolution of 1816. The first of these acts 
merely makes it the duty of the Treasurer of the United States 
to receive and keep the public moneys, and to disburse the same 
upon the warrants of the Secretary of the Treasury, leaving all 
the subordinate agencies, through which the receipts and pay- 
ments of this great nation are to be conducted, entirely without 
legal specification or selection. The second of them relates main- 
ly to moneys appropriated for the War and Navy Departments, 
and supplies none of the defects of the previous act. And the 
resolution of 1816 prescribes only the medium in which the public 
revenue shall be collected. These comprise all the law there is 
on the subject. These are the disjecta membra, the dry find 
detached bones, of our existing fiscal system ; and it is left to 



THE SAFE KEEPING OF THE PUBLIC MONEYS. 355 

Executive construction to knit them together as it can, and to 
clothe them with what body it pleases. The report of the Com- 
mittee of Ways and Means admits all this, and declares that, 
since the late vetoes of the President, " the public moneys have 
remained in the hands of officers appointed by the Executive, 
without any definite regulation by law." 

For one, I cannot feel that my duty to the country, as one of 
its humblest Representatives, is discharged, in leaving this dis- 
cretion longer unchecked. Do gentlemen tell me, that we have 
tried twice to accomplish this object, and that our efforts have 
twice been defeated by the interposition of Executive vetoes ? 
Sir, I am no vindicator of those vetoes, and no apologist for 
them in any degree. I join as heartily as any man in this House 
in deploring and condemning the use which has been made of 
this odious veto power, both in relation to this and other matters; 
though, perhaps, I may not think it consistent with the dignity 
and decorum which belongs to this place, to indulge in such 
expressions on the subject as have too often been heard here. 
But, so far from finding, in such considerations as these, any 
ground for relaxing our efforts in relation to the public moneys, 
I hold them to be additional reasons for persevering, until our 
duty has been accomplished. We are the Representatives of the 
people. We have something of peculiar constitutional respon- 
sibility for the safety of the moneys of the people. And because 
the Executive, whose discretion we desire to control and regu- 
late, has seen fit, from any cause, I care not whether of con- 
science or of contumacy, to arrest and resist our interposition, 
shall we, therefore, forbear altogether, and leave him in undis- 
turbed possession of the Treasury ? I cannot so read our duty. 
On the contrary, if there be distrust of the Executive ; if there 
be disapprobation of his policy or principles ; if there be alarm 
or apprehension as to his aims and ends, and as to the means 
by which he seeks to accomplish them ; there is all the more rea- 
son, in my judgment, for persisting in our attempts, until the 
public moneys shall be again placed under legislative securi- 
ties and safeguards. Sir, if there be fear of a union of purse and 
swOrd, we have that union now, in the very form in which it 
first became the subject of Whig denunciation, when General 



356 THE SAFE KEEPING OF THE PUBLIC MONEYS. 

Jackson removed the deposites from the Bank of the United 
States ; and it is for us, if that union must, in any shape, be 
continued, at least to provide, that it shall henceforth be a union 
regulated and restricted by law. 

Thus far, it is true, our Treasury has been in little danger. 
Our poverty has been our protection. The utter emptiness of the 
public colTers has made it almost a matter of indifference who 
kept the keys, or whether there were any keys at all. Cantabit 
vacuus coram lalrone viator. We have enjoyed something of the 
security of the penniless traveller, who whistles in the face of the 
hisjhwavman. But a different state of things is not far off. I 
have no fear that the tariff of the last session, if only allowed 
to go fairly into operation, is about to be so ruinous to our 
revenue as some gentlemen have prophesied. Let the ability 
of the people to consume be stimulated, until it rises above 
the famine standard, above the almost starving and freezing 
point, to which an unchecked foreign competition with their 
labor has reduced it, and there is nothing in the present scale of 
duties which will prevent an ample influx of revenue. The 
country has seen higher duties than these, and an overflowing 
Treasury at the same time. Certainly, if the rigor of the cash 
payments should be mitigated by the adoption of that ware- 
housing system, which, I am happy to say, has been matured 
by the Committee of Commerce this very morning, and if, too, 
this House could be prevailed on to impose a moderate, tem- 
porary duty on tea and coffee, — a measure which no one would 
feel as oppressive, and which a due regard to [the public credit 
demands of ns, in my judgment, to adopt before we adjourn, — 
we should witness a very different condition of the finances of 
the country at the commencement of the next session. But, at 
any rate, full or empty, exuberant or exhausted, the Treasury of 
the nation ought now and always to be under legislative regula- 
tion and control. This, Sir, is Whig doctrine. Republican doc- 
trine. Democratic doctrine, Constitutional doctrine. 

And now, Mr. Speaker, I have no hesitation in saying that a 
National Bank, of moderate capital, say fifteen or twenty mil- 
lions at the farthest, with such limitations and restrictions as the 
(experience of the last ten years has abundantly suggested, always 



THE SAFE KEEPING OF THE PUBLIC MONEYS. 357 

has been, and is still, my first choice for the fiscal agent of the 
Government. Nor has the profligate mismanagement of such 
an institution, which has recently been exhibited, destroyed or 
impaired my confidence in its value. No, Sir, no more than the 
monstrous misrule to which this nation has been subjected from 
time to time, during the last twelve years, has destroyed my 
confidence in the free and glorious form of government under 
which we live. I am rash enough to think, too, that this very 
moment would be, in many respects, a favorable moment for 
establishing such an institution ; believing that, while our expe- 
rience of the evils to which its bad management has exposed us, 
is still fresh and uneffaced, a bank would be established on safer 
and stricter principles, and on a less magnificent and dangerous 
scale, than at almost any time hereafter. The principles of the 
President have, however, rendered this an utterly impracticable 
idea. 

But there are other modes which might be tried, and which 
ought to be tried, for the same end. If this Congress is willing 
to do nothing else, it might call upon the Secretary of the Trea- 
sury to set down in black and white, and to present to us in the 
form of a statute, his present working plan for keeping, collect- 
ing, and disbursing the public funds. We might examine it, 
amend it, and give it the sanction of a law. Better have any 
system, even a bad one, resting on written law, than no system 
at all, or than a bad system, resting on mere Executive will. 

So strongly, Mr. Speaker, have I felt the impropriety of leaving 
the custody of the public treasures of the country longer at the 
mere discretion of the Executive, that, as events have turned out, 
I have more than once been inclined to regret, that the Sub- Trea- 
sury system itself was so summarily repealed. Odious and abhor- 
rent as that system was regarded, I could hardly bring myself to 
vote for its entire repeal at this moment, were it still in existence, 
except by voting for the simultaneous substitution of something 
better. And I will do the justice to the party with which I am 
associated here, to say. that I believe it was no part of their ori- 
ginal purpose, at the extra session, to repeal that system as an 
independent measure. It has often been charged, and often, as 
I think, most unjustly charged, that the Whig party were actu- 



358 THE SAFE KEEPING OF THE PUBLIC MONEYS. 

ated, at the extra session, by a desire to embarrass and perplex 
the President of the United States. There is far more ground, 
Sir, for charging them, in some cases, with too great a willingness 
to yield to his suggestions. That accusation of a spirit of com- 
pliance, which the honorable gentleman from Virginia, (Mr. 
Wise,) arrayed against us the other day, has, in my opinion, 
much more of foundation ; though, perhaps, it hardly lies with 
the President's immediate friends to cast it in our teeth. The 
outright repeal of the Sub-Treasury system, as a separate act, 
was, as I understand it, a measure of pure complaisance towards 
the Executive. Its history was on this wise: The first bank 
charter had passed, and was under Executive advisement. Its 
signature would have repealed the Sub-Treasury system prospect- 
ively. Its veto would have left that system standing permanently. 
A suggestion was made, from some quarter or other, that the Pre- 
sident took this course unkindly, — that it looked like a purpose 
to make him either sign the bank charter, or be responsible for 
the continuance of a system which he himself admitted had been 
condemned. It was thought that it would put him in better 
humor for a favorable consideration of the bank, if he were reliev- 
ed from this predicament. And upon this hint, the Sub-Treasury 
repeal bill was hastily carried through. For one, I can hardly 
help regretting that such a course was taken. I would rather 
have left the Sub-Treasury system on the statute book, on the 
joint responsibility of those who originated it, and of those who 
prevented the adoption of the proposed substitute, until some 
third system should have been devised. We might have taken 
out the teeth of the monster. W^e rAight have extracted the poi- 
son from its fangs. We might have abolished the specie clause, 
a provision, which, as Mr. Gallatin has well remarked, was 
operative against those banks alone which continued to pay in 
specie, — "a warfare directed exclusively against those institu- 
tions which performed their duty, and, not without difficulty, 
sustained a sound currency." And perhaps other beneficial 
modifications might have been ingrafted on it at a future day. 
But, as a system for keeping the public moneys, it was at least 
better than none, and might better have been left in existence 
until we could agree upon something to take its place. 



THE SAFE KEEPING OF THE PUBLIC MONEYS. 359 

After the expression of these views, Mr. Speaker, no one can be 
surprised, when I say that I prefer even to adopt that part of the 
Exchequer plan, which provides for the custody and disburse- 
ment of the public funds, to doing nothing; and that I am, 
therefore, entirely unwilling to cut myself off from the opportu- 
nity of supporting so much at least of the President's plan, by 
voting for the resolution before us. 

But this is not the only part of the Exchequer plan, for which, 
under all circumstances, I am disposed to vote. I am not one 
of those who hold that the duty of the Government on this sub- 
ject ends with making provision for the management of its own 
finances. I am no subscriber to the doctrine, which was heard a 
few years ago, that the Government should look out for itself, 
and should let the people look out for themselves. On the con- 
trary, in relation both to revenue and to finance, the interests of 
the people should be embraced in every consideration of the 
wants of the Government. Especially, at a moment of such 
commercial embarrassment and depression as the present, we 
should contemplate, if possible, no measure of relief to the 
Treasury, which does not hold out some hope of relief to the 
community also. We all regret, — all of us at least who consti- 
tute the majority in this House, — that circumstances have pre- 
vented us from doing what we desired to do in this behalf. Bur, 
if we cannot do all that we wish, let us not fail to do all that we 
conscientiously and constitutionally can, trusting to other and 
greater opportunities for the ultimate fvilfilment of our desires. 

Now, Sir, I am one of those who believe, that a simple issue 
of fifteen or twenty millions of Exchequer notes, redeemable in 
specie, at sight, (and I would prefer them redeemable in the city 
of New York alone, or, at most, at one or two other points,) and 
resting on a basis sufficient to secure their redeemability from all 
danger and all doubt, at any and every instant when they might 
be presented, would be a very considerable convenience and 
relief, both to the Government and to the people. Government 
paper is, indeed, no prime favorite of mine, in any form. I regret 
that we have been under the necessity of resorting to it at all. 
But, as we have lived upon it already for five or six years, and 
seem not likely, at present, to obtain a national medium of cir- 



360 THE SAFE KEEPING OF THE PUBLIC MONEYS. 

culation of any other kind, I am willing to try it in the most 
convenient shape. Nor can I agree with gentlemen who pro- 
nounce such a medium, based upon specie even to the extent of 
dollar for dollar, as not worth having. Something a little more 
liberal, so it were safe, might undoubtedly be preferable. Some- 
thing more liberal would indeed be indispensable, so far as any 
relief to the Treasury is concerned ; and the President's plan, 
accordingly, makes provision for basing an issue of fifteen mil- 
lions of notes upon five millions of specie, and five millions of 
Government bonds to be negotiated as needed. Increase the 
authority to issue bonds to the full amount which might be 
necessary in any emergency for redeeming the entire issue of 
notes, and the safety of such a provision could hardly be ques- 
tioned. The bonds would, in all probability, never be called for, 
and the Treasury would have an addition of ten millions to its 
resources at a moment when such an addition may be absolutely 
indispensable to the preservation of the public credit. But the 
mere substitution of paper for metal is certainly a great conve- 
nience to the people ; and gentlemen forget one of the heads of 
their old arguments against a hard-money currency, when they 
spurn such a substitution as so utterly worthless and contemptible. 
Such a paper would be convenient for local payments, convenient 
for Treasury payments, and, more especially, convenient as a 
medium of exchange. Even Treasury notes, as now issued, at 
interest, and on time, are acknowledged to have been a great 
convenience and relief in all these respects. Indeed, it is almost 
impossible to conceive how the business either of the Treasury 
or of the people could have been conducted, during the difficul- 
ties and distresses of the last five years, without the aid of such 
an instrument of receipt and payment. 

Mr. Speaker, there are other features of the Executive plan of 
an Exchequer about which I have many misgivings, and for 
which, I confess, I do not see my way clear to vote. I refer 
particularly to the power to purchase bills of exchange. There 
is certainly room to apprehend, that such a power would not be 
exercised wisely, even if it were exercised honestly, by those to 
whom it is proposed to be intrusted. In such hands it would, 
undoubtedly, be liable to great abuses, both from ignorance and 



THE SAFE KEEPING OP THE PUBLIC MONEYS. 361 

from intention. I have the strongest reluctance, too, to making 
any part of our fiscal system dependent on the assent of the 
States, — a condition without which this Exchange power could 
hardly receive the sanction of the President. I confess. Sir, it 
is rather late in the day for some of us to take umbrage at this 
condition. My venerable colleague (Mr. Adams) and the honor- 
able member from Kentucky (Mr. Marshall) are perhaps the 
only members on our side of the House who are privileged to 
carp at it. All the rest of us voted for a most miserable com- 
promise of this principle of State assent, in the first bank charter 
of the extra session, and we all remember the opening thunders 
of the gentleman from Kentucky on thai occasion. We gave 
those votes with an honest desire to satisfy the President's con- 
science; but they only served to wound our own ; and, for one, 
I am more willing to cry peccavi, in relation to that vote, than to 
have it recorded as a precedent for my future action. Nor do I 
believe that this Exchange feature of the bill, under all the limit- 
ations and restrictions which must be imposed upon it, would 
be so very great a boon to the country. Public opinion, in some 
quarters of the country certainly, has undergone great muta- 
tions on the subject of exchanges. Government regulation of 
exchanges is much less called for than it used to be. As the 
local currencies of the country become sound, the enormous 
rates of exchange are found to disappear. The aid which is 
now demanded of the government, is aid through the medium 
of currency ; and to supply this aid to the exchanges is un- 
doubtedly as far as any positive duty of the government can 
extend. The substitution of gold for silver, as the main ingre- 
dient of our metallic medium, as is strongly stated by my re- 
spected predecessor, (Mr. Appleton,) in his able pamphlet on the 
currency, has exerted a most salutary influence in lessening the 
rates of exchange. "While the transportation of silver would 
hardly have been attempted between New York and Boston, for 
instance, with an exchange below one per cent, — gold is trans- 
ported from one city to the other before the exchange can rise to 
a quarter of one per cent. But I will not dwell longer on the 
subject of exchanges, nor indeed on any of the other features of 
the Exchequer system. When the bill itself shall come up for 

31 



362 THE SAFE KEEPING OF THE PUBLIC MONEYS. 

consideration, there will be ample opportunity for discussing its 
details ; and I intend to leave myself at liberty to vote as I shall 
then think fit, upon each and every part of the plan. Meantime, 
I have said enough to show, that, though not ready to pledge 
myself to the entire Executive project, I am ready to adopt, if 
nothing better is proposed, some portions, if not the whole, of 
the bills which have been reported in the Senate and in the 
House. In so doing, I shall vote for that which many persons, 
in whose judgment I have the highest confidence, consider alto- 
gether harmless ; for that, which many other persons, and my- 
self among the number, regard as likely to be positively bene- 
ficial ; and for that, which not a few persons will never believe 
is not the genuine specific, the Matchless Sanative, for all the 
troubles of the country, until it has been tried and found 
wanting. Above all. Sir, I shall vote for that, which may give 
something of at least temporary rest and repose to the 
public mind, on this long-vexed question of the currency, and 
which may satisfy the people that there is no purpose in any 
quarter to keep the wounds of the body politic open and bleed- 
ing, in order to excite party sympathy and stimulate party strug- 
gle two years hence. 

I come now, Mr. Speaker, to a few remarks on the report and 
resolution before us. And before making them, I beg leave to 
bear my humble testimony to the ability, integrity, and patriot- 
ism of the honorable chairman (Mr. Fillmore) by whom the 
report has been prepared. I respond most cordially to the tones 
of honest indignation with which he yesterday repelled an infa- 
mous slander upon himself and his colleagues. And I trust that, 
in dissenting from some of the doctrines of the report, I shall 
not seem wanting in regard and respect for its author. 

The report admits, on one of its earliest pages, that if it were 
possible to create such an institution, without increasing Execu- 
tive power or endangering the Treasury, and to have it adminis- 
tered by men of undoubted talents and integrity, it would be 
capable of rendering some service both to the business wants of 
the country and the financial embarrassments of the Treasury. 
It immediately adds, however, " that to hope for this, is to ex- 
pect a change in human nature itself, and in the ordinary mo- 



THE SAFE KEEPING OF THE PUBLIC MONEYS. 363 

tives that govern the conduct of men, and especially political 
men, little less than miraculous. Our institutions are based 
upon no such theory of human perfectibility." 

Now, Mr. Speaker, the honorable chairman must pardon me 
for saying, that if this Exchequer plan of the President is too 
much based on a theory of human perfectibility, it really seems 
to me that his report runs quite as far to the other extreme, and 
rests its objections to the plan too much on a theory of total 
depravity and universal corruption. This, if I mistake not, is 
the great peculiarity of the report. Its arguments are able and 
forcible, but they are, almost all of them, arguments from abuse. 
Every possible evil which such an institution may produce, if 
intrusted to dishonest hands, is exhibited in its most alarming 
aspect. The advantages which it might render, if administered 
by honest agents, are disposed of a good deal more summarily. 
It really occurred to me, as I read this report, that my honorable 
friend might have taken as his text, in writing it, the saying of — 
I forget what statesman or philosopher of ancient Greece, — that 
the only safety in relation to human government is distrust — 
distrust — distrust ; or, as a Roman poet conveyed the same 
idea, — '■^ una salus, nuUam sperare sal litems Sir, it is not to be 
denied that something of distrust is useful in relation to all hu- 
man governments, and more especially in relation to our own 
government. But it is equally undeniable that some degree of 
confidence, that a great deal of confidence, is not only useful, 
but absolutely indispensable, to the successful operation of every 
government, and even to the very existence of a free govern- 
ment. It is true, our institutions are not based on a theory of 
human perfectibility ; but they are based on a theory of human 
morality, integrity, and virtue. This is the distinctive feature 
of free goverimients. It was laid down truly by Montesquieu, 
long ago, that the foundation principle of a despotism was fear; 
of monarchy, honor ; but of a republic, virtue. And there must 
be public virtue as well as private virtue; — virtue in the govern- 
ment, as well as virtue among the people. The two things are 
in fact inseparable for any long period of time; for, a virtuous 
people will either expel a corrupt administration, or a corrupt 
administration will debauch a virtuous people. If virtue, there- 



364 THE SAFE KEEPING OF THE PUBLIC MONEYS. 

fore, shall indeed have taken its final flight from our public 
councils and from those who preside over them, — as this report 
wonld almost seem to intimate, — vain, vain, will be the attempt 
to bolster up our political fabric by any mere artificial machinery, 
or to prevent its downfall by any degree of distrustful vigi- 
lance. Sir, if such be really the deplorable and desperate con- 
dition of our republic, the passage of this resolution will do 
nothing to save it from ruin, nor will the adoption of the Exche- 
quer plan be at all responsible for its overthrow. It will fall by 
its own weakness and its own weight, like any other structure 
whose corner-stone has already crumbled into dust. 

But I do not apprehend so disastrous a catastrophe at present. 
I freely admit, that we have had no great encouragement to 
cherish any very implicit trust in our rulers for some years past. 
Within the last year even, we have seen demonstrations, and 
heard declarations, but too well calculated to check the flow, if 
not entirely to congeal the current, of that tide of returning con- 
fidence which came out to greet the accession of a new adminis- 
tration. But I am not willing to believe that the age of vir- 
tuous politics is gone forever. I trust that we may again see at 
the head of this republic, men, like those who have stood there in 
its early days ; men, like those whom we have seen there in years 
within our own remembrance ; men, who will feel, in entering 
upon public office, that they have been called to no pitiful job, 
but to a sacred function ; men, who may be addressed in the 
words, though certainly not in the spirit, in which JNIacbeth was 
addressed by — the demi-demon, I had almost said, with whom 
his destiny was associated. 



■' Thou wouldst be great ; 



Art not without ambition ; but without 

The illness should attend it. What thou wouldst highlj', 

That wouldst thou holily." 

And, Sir, if such a day sho'uld again arrive, how would the 
petty and paltry contentions which embitter and embroil us here, 
and in the prosecution of which the true interests of the nation 
are so often forgotten and neglected, be hushed into silence! 
How would the public prosperity revive, the public peace be 
restored, the confidence of the people in the government be 



THE SAFE KEEPING OF THE PUBLIC MONEYS. 365 

reassured, and the public faifh resume again, in the eyes of all 
the world, that robe of stainless and inviolate sanctity in which 
it was first clothed by the fathers of the republic I 

But, at all events, Mr. Speaker, whether this hope be realized 
or not, I do not think it quite time yet to base our systems, or 
our objections to systems, on a theory of universal corruption 
and corruptibility, or even upon the doctrine of my honorable 
friend who has just taken his seat, (Mr. Barnard,) that public 
office is the very worst school of morals on this side the peni- 
tentiary. This report would really seem to trust nobody in 
relation to finance and currency; not the President, not the 
Secretary, not the subordinate Executive agents, not the Senate, 
not the House of Representatives, not each individually, not all 
conjointly. The President will abuse the veto power; the Pre- 
sident and Senate will abuse the appointing and removing 
power; the Secretary and subordinate agents will abuse their 
authority to keep the public moneys ; and the Congress of the 
United States, even should it restrict the issues of Exchequer 
notes within a proper limit at the outset, will run into ruinous 
excesses in the end. " As vou cannot check or control Congress 
on this subject, (says the report,) it would follow that we ought 
not to attempt to exercise this power." 

Why, Sir, it is as much as ever that even a United States 
Bank can find a loophole of escape from the universal discredit 
in which the report deals. There is too much foundation for 
the remark of the minority of the committee, that some of the 
objections of the majority to this Exchequer scheme apply 
equally to a National Bank. As such an institution, however, 
was unquestionably intended to be excepted from any terms of 
distrust, I wish now to say a word or two on some of the ex- 
pressions and some of the implications of the report on that 
subject. 

The report seems to me to lay a little too much stress on what 
it denominates the watchful caution of the interested stock- 
holders of such a bank. The private capital of a national bank 
is, undoubtedly, a great security for the safety of the government 
deposits ; but the vigilance of stockholders has proved thus far 
to be a most miserable ground of reliance. Where has been the 

31* 



366 THE SAFE KEEPING OF THE PUBLIC MONEYS. 

watchful caution of interested stockholders, in the countless 
defalcations and frauds which have recently involved us in so 
much distress at home and so much disgrace abroad ? This 
Argus of self-interest may have a hundred eyes, but it has never 
yet used one of them. It has been drugged and jDosseted into 
perfect blindness. The stockholders of our banks, and it ought 
to be spoken to their shame, have looked to nothing but the divi- 
dends, as long as there were any dividends to look to, while the 
directors, clerks, and cashiers, have exercised unlimited control 
over their concerns. 

Sir, I have already said that a national bank was my first 
choice as the fiscal agent of this government ; and so far as this 
report goes in asserting or in implying that such an institution 
is the first choice of the committee, I most heartily agree with 
it. But if it is intended to be implied that there is no second 
choice, — that this government can, under no circumstances and 
in no emergency, employ any other fiscal machinery, — I must 
dissent from the doctrine. I have no fancy for independent 
treasuries, in the sense in which this phrase has lately been used, 
but that this government ought not, in any case, to provide a 
system of its own, for keeping its own moneys, for managing 
its own finances, and for maintaining and regulating a national 
currency for itself and the people, I certainly am not prepared 
to admit. Why, Sir, let me suppose a case. Suppose that the 
first bank charter, which was passed by the two Houses at the 
extra session, instead of having failed through the veto of the 
President, had failed, as most people in my part of the country 
seem to think it would have failed, for want of subscribers to its 
stock, would a majority of this House, in that event, have felt it 
their duty to leave things as they were, and to abandon all further 
effort? Is it not even possible that, if we had come together at 
the commencement of the last session of Congress under such 
circumstances, and with no cause of complaint against the Presi- 
dent, and no feelings of bitterness towards any body connected 
with the administration, we should have looked upon some such 
plan as this very Exchequer, with a good deal less of alarm and 
horror than we now regard it ? Whether so or not. Sir, such an 
exigency might have occurred, and may occur again. Are we, 



THE SAFE KEEPING OF THE PUBLIC MONEYS. 367 

then, ready to say that Government cannot discharge its duty to 
itself and its duty to the people, unless the capitalists of the 
country will take stock in a bank ? We who refuse to make any 
part of our fiscal system dependent on the assent of the States, 
are we ready to make that system entirely dependent on the 
assent of individual citizens ? If not, why should we not do 
now, that which we should be willing to do in the case I have 
supposed? The same exigency now exists, though arising from 
a difi'erent cause. The impracticability of obtaining a bank at 
this moment is as clearly determined, by the refusal of the Pre- 
sident to subscribe his name to its charter, as it would be by the 
refusal of capitalists to subscribe their names to its stock list. 
And though there may be much more right to complain in one 
case than in the other, the emergency is the same in both, and 
our responsibilities in both are alike and identical. 

One word. Sir, in reference to another suggestion of the report, 
before I proceed to the resolution with which it concludes. A 
provision is contained in the President's plan of an Exchequer, 
and is improved upon, I believe, in the bills both of the Senate 
and House, to limit the removing power of the Executive in 
relation to the commissioners and other officers of the board. 
Such a provision undoubtedly does away many of the dangers 
of the system. But the report pronounces all this unconstitu- 
tional. It declares that Congress possesses no such power, and 
that any fancied security, built upon such a hypothesis, must 
prove fallacious. Now this was not the doctrine of the Whig 
Senate of the United States in days when a Whig Senate was 
all we had to rely upon. On the contrary, the Whig Senators 
of those days, with Mr. Clay and Mr. Webster in perfect har- 
mony at their head, went strongly for the right and for the duty 
of such limitations. Some of them, indeed, went very much 
further than this bill proposes to go, and declared themselves in 
favor of reversing the decision of 1789 ; but none of them, I 
believe, made any question that limitations of some kind might 
be, and ought to be, made. 

The report under consideration concludes with a resolution 
" that the plan of an Exchequer, presented to Congress by the 
Secretary of the Treasury at the last session, entitled ' a bill, 



368 THE SAFE KEEPING OF THE PUBLIC MONEYS. 

amendatory of the several acts establishing the Treasury depart- 
ment,' ought not to be adopted." This resolution is immediately 
preceded by the remark, that the committee deem the plan to be 
" essentially defective, and incapable of any modification, at 
least without an amendment of the Constitution, that could 
justify its adoption." I am told, however, that the resolution 
may be adopted without any reference to the report, and that 
it is not intended to reach beyond the precise bill which was 
furnished by the Secretary of the Treasury ; and some of my 
colleagues and friends, from whom I do not differ materially in 
opinion, will vote for it, I am aware, with this understanding. 
But the common mind will not so construe the resolution. Nor 
does it seem reasonable, that we should be held to the precise 
provisions, phraseology, and punctuation of a particular bill, to 
which there has been no opportunity for amendment, and be 
compelled to declare affirmatively or negatively upon a resolution 
for its rejection. Why should such a resolution be pressed to a 
vote ? Why not lay it on the table, as you do all other adverse 
reports? Why waste the time and temper of the House in dis- 
cussing mere abstract opinions, instead of going into committee 
of the whole, and acting on the bill to which those opinions 
relate ? I have no doubt. Sir, that the resolution was introduced 
into the House in a proper spirit, and with no unbecoming 
motives. I concur in no imputations on the Committee of 
Ways and ]Means. But there is not a little sensitiveness in many 
quarters, as to the movements of the present Congress upon this, 
and, indeed, upon every other subject. Every thing out of the 
common course, as this certainly is, will be imputed to sinister 
designs. Pass this resolution by an overwhelming vote, as I 
doubt not you will, if you insist on taking the vote in this form, 
and it w411 be regarded as an act of mere hostility to the Presi- 
dent, and of mere retaliation for his bank vetoes. It would be 
regarded as intended to stamp something of peculiar reproach 
and unaccustomed reprobation on this measure and its author. 
It will look as if you desired the triumph of holding up this bill 
to the scorn and derision of the country, and saying, — here is 
Mr. Tyler's and Mr. Webster's famous fiscal project, with hardly 
one man so poor as to do it reverence. Now, Sir, I am not dis- 



THE SAFE KEEPING OF THE PUBLIC MONEYS. 369 

posed to shrink from any just or necessary act of legislation, for 
fear of misconstruction, or to save appearances. But on a mere 
amateur proceeding of this sort, I would give no vote which can 
be so misconstrued. " A thousand false eyes are stuck upon us." 
Let us not again gratify their malicious gaze. Let us disappoint, 
for once, their eager search for subjects of mystification and per- 
version. For myself. Sir, as I have already intimated, if a vote 
is insisted upon, I shall vote against the resolution ; both because 
I am opposed to the policy and propriety of such a proceeding, 
and because I am unwilling to foreclose all direct consideration 
of the subject, and to cut myself off from voting for the whole 
or any part of the Exchequer plan, now or hereafter. I shall 
give such a vote with the less reluctance, from the consideration 
that, in differing from great numbers of my political friends, I 
shall differ from, perhaps, an equal number of my political oppo- 
nents. There were no party lines on this resolution in commit- 
tee, and it is plain that there will be none in the House. 

Mr. Speaker, I cannot feel justified in resigning the floor, as my 
hour has not quite yet expired, without alluding to a course of 
remark which has been persisted in, for some weeks past, in 
relation to the supposed author of this Exchequer plan. I am 
not here, sir, as the champion of the Secretary of State. Heaven 
help him, if he has not a more tried and trustworthy arm than 
mine to look to, if he shall ever require any other than his own I 
He will, doubtless, say amen to this aspiration ; for I have no 
idea that he will thank me for many of the remarks which I have 
already made, or for many of those which I am about to make. 
He is, indeed, one of my most distinguished constituents. I 
might appeal, however, to the' gentleman from Kentucky, (Mr. 
Marshall,) who counts among his constituents the great and 
gallant statesman of the West, to bear witness with me, that 
such a relation does not necessarily involve any thing of peculiar 
cordiality or confidence; though, certainly, it cannot imply any 
thing of the reverse. But, at any rate, holding, as I do, that 
great injustice has been done to Mr. Webster, on more than one 
occasion, by gentlemen who have gone out of their way to in- 
troduce his name into the debate, no fear, either of personal 
imputation or of political misconstruction, shall make me shrink 



370 THE SAFE KEtPING OF THE PUBLIC MONEYS. 

from saying so. I should be unworthy of sitting here as the 
Representative of Faneuil Hall, and should hardly dare to look 
those who are accustomed to meet there in the face, were I to 
listen longer, without a word of protest, to the wholesale re- 
proaches which have been cast upon one, who has so long been 
associated with their fortunes and their fame. 

Sir, I was not at Faneuil Hall when Mr. Webster made the 
speech which has been the subject of such frequent allusion. I 
have read that speech, however, more than once ; and, as I do 
not intend to be charged with any non-committal or concealment, 
I have no hesitation in saying that it contains many opinions 
which I deeply regret were ever expressed, and from which I 
entirely dissent. The idea, which seems to be implied in one 
part of the speech, that the Whigs of Massachusetts, in declaring 
"a full and final separation" from President Tyler, designed to 
commit themselves to an indiscriminate opposition to all the 
measures of his administration, good, bad, and indifl'erent, was 
certainly unwarranted by any thing which they had ever done at 
home, or which their representatives had ever done here. The 
opinion which seems to be conveyed in another part of the speech, 
that the Whig party in Congress deserved no particular credit for 
the recent passage of a protecting tarifi"; that, because twenty or 
thirty Whigs, in one branch or the other, voted against the tariff, 
and ten or a dozen of their opponents voted for it, while the great 
body of the Whigs had, from first to last, devoted their most stre- 
nuous efforts to its adoption, and the great body of the Van Buren 
party had labored incessantly to defeat and reject it; that, there- 
fore, there was no party element in the proceeding, and no party 
credit for the result, was, to my mind, equally indefensible. It 
was confounding the rule and the exception, and placing both up- 
on equal terms. The denial of the authority of the State Conven- 
tion, also, to act upon matters which every Massachusetts Whig 
Convention, for ten years before, had been accustomed to act 
upon without qualification or question, was any thing but reason- 
able. But, Sir, there are other passages of this speech, upon 
which constructions have been put, which are utterly ungenerous 
and unjust. The idea, which has more than once been advanced 
in this House, that Mr. Webster's exclamation on that occasion, 



THE SAFE KEEPING OF THE PUBLIC MONEYS. 371 

"where do they mean to place me? where am I to fall?" — 
instead of being applied, as it was, simply and solely to his rela- 
tions to the Whigs of Massachusetts, with whom he had stood 
so long on terms of confidence and respect, such as few other 
men ever before enjoyed — was an expression of a corrupt, base, 
unprincipled lust for office, or of an abject, craven, cringing fear 
of being turned out of office, is as unfounded as it is gross. It 
is wholly unsustained by the spirit or by the letter of the speech. 
The very next sentence to that in which these questions are con- 
tained, destroys all apology for such a construction. " If I choose 
to remain in the President's councils, do these gentlemen mean 
to say that I cease to be a Massachusetts Whig ?" — This is the 
sum and substance of both the interrogatories which have been 
rung through these halls with so much scorn, and which have 
formed the foundation of this infamous charge of servility and 
corruption. The question, as to the collectors, attorneys, postmas- 
ters and marshals, is fairly susceptible of no other interpretation. 
And so, also, with that in relation to my excellent and distin- 
guished friend, (Mr. Everett,) the present Minister to England. 
The inquiry, as to all of them, was whether, by this full and final 
separation from Mr. Tyler, the Whigs of Massachusetts meant to 
say that they intended to discard and denounce so many of their 
eminent brother W^higs who then were holding office, unless they 
either resigned or were turned out. And this is "the detestable 
doctrine" which has so disgraced Daniel W^ebster, and so dese- 
crated Faneuii Hall I The questions may all have been uncalled 
for ; but if they imply a love for any thing, it is a love of party 
and not of place ; if a fear of any thing, it is a fear of being aban- 
doned by friends, rather than of being turned out of office. 

Sir, it would have been better, far better, for all concerned, if 
this little family jar in Massachusetts had not been meddled 
with by strangers, and if the parties to it had been left to scold 
it out among themselves. But I utterly protest against such an 
exaggeration of its details and history, and such a misrepresent- 
ation of the language which was used on the occasion. As to 
Mr. Webster's love of office, there is no evidence that this love 
is stronger in him than in many other gentlemen who are justly 
esteemed and honored in the land. He retained office, indeed. 



372 THE SAFE KEEPING OF THE PUBLIC MONEYS. 

when other gentlemen, his colleagues in the cabinet, retired. 
But there was as little reason in charging him with having held 
on to his commission from the mere love of office, as there would 
be in charging them with having resigned for the mere hate of 
office. These gentlemen, for whom I have always entertained 
and expressed the highest possible regard and respect, felt that it 
was due to their own honor to withdraw from the cabinet. They 
did so. And, though there were some of their friends who 
would have preferred that they should have remained, and put 
the President to his removing power, if he desired to get rid of 
them, yet all, all, acquiesced in their decision, and in their own 
right to make that decision for themselves. Mr. Webster, on 
the contrary, felt it consistent with his honor to stay, and carry 
on that great work of negotiation with Great Britain, upon 
which he had just entered. My venerable colleague (Mr. Adams) 
has recently told his constituents and the country that he advis- 
ed him to stay, at least until that negotiation was concluded. 
"Thinking I was in a post where I was in the service of the 
country," says Mr. Webster, himself, in this Faneuil Hall speech, 
" and could do it good, I staid there. I leave it to you, to-day, 
to say, I leave it to my country to say, whether the country 
would have been better off if I had left also. I have no attach- 
ment to office. I have tasted of its sweets, but I have tasted of 
its bitterness. I am content with what I have achieved ; I am 
more ready to rest satisfied with what is gained than to run the 
risk of doubtful efTorts for new acquisitions." Who doubts, Sir, 
that Mr. Webster has tasted of the bitterness of office as well as 
of its sweets ? Who doubts that he has had his perplexities and 
provocations, during the political hurly-burly of the last two 
years, as well as we ours ? And who denies that, amid them 
all, he has discharged the peculiar and most responsible duties 
of his post, with unsurpassed ability and success ? He has ren- 
dered great services to his country, — services which will prevent 
the present administration, unfortunate and odious as it may 
have been in many respects, from being quite so mere a paren- 
thesis on the page of history as was at one time suggested. 
The treaty of Washington can never be passed over, in the 
future perusal of our annals, " without destroying the sense." It 



THE SAFE KEEPING OF THE PUBLIC MONEYS. 373 

may not catch the eye of the cursory reader, indeed, so quickly, 
as if it were written in letters of blood ; nor may it occupy so 
large a space as the dread alternative it has averted ; but it will 
be inscribed in characters which will rivet, as with a charm, the 
attention and admiration of every thoughtful patriot and every 
true philanthropist, and which will continually acquire fresh lus- 
tre with the advancing progress of civilization and Christianity. 
The light which flashes from the sword of the successful war- 
rior may dazzle for a day, or even for an age ; but a far more 
enduring radiance will encircle the names of those who have 
reconciled the proud and angry spirits of two mighty nations, 
and have honorably secured for them both the unspeakable bless- 
ing of Peace. 

Mr. Webster has been charged with great and glaring incon- 
sistencies on the subject of the currency and the Constitution ; 
and this Exchequer project is declared to be in direct contra- 
diction to the doctrines of his whole previous political life. 
Now, Sir, I am not going to argue this point. I have no idea 
that Lcould argue it to anybody's satisfaction, if I should try. I 
will not pretend to say that this plan does not, in my own opi- 
nion, contain provisions which Mr. Webster has opposed and 
condemned in other connections, and under other circumstances. 
But this I will say, that the great and leading idea of almost all 
his speeches against the Sub-Treasury system was, that it was 
an entire abandonment of the power and duty of the General 
Government to regulate the currency and the exchanges. 
Wherever he addressed the people, in Wall street or in State 
street, at Saratoga or at Bunker Hill, this was the burden of his 
argument. And, so far as this argument is concerned, he is en- 
tirely consistent in advocating the Exchequer plan. But if it 
were not so, Mr. Speaker, I confess that I have yet to see evi- 
dence that, when arraigned, in reference to this project, on the 
mere score of consistency, Mr. Webster might not avail him- 
self of the answer of an Athenian orator on a similar occasion, 
and say, " I may have acted contrary to myself, but I have not 
acted contrary to the Republic." The merits of this measure, 
if it has any, are certainly independent of any man's consistency. 
It has been devised under circumstances unlike any which ever 

32 



374 THE SAFE KEEPING OP THE PUBLIC MONEYS. 

existed before in the history of this country, and unlike, as I heart- 
ily hope, any which will ever exist again. It has been brought 
forward, as I believe, in good faith, and with an honest purpose 
for the public welfare. If any part of it, or if the whole of it, 
be regarded as unwise, inexpedient, or unsafe, by this House or 
by the country; if it be really " the terrible machine" which the 
report declares it to be, which would " overwhelm the Treasury 
with bankruptcy, corrupt the government, and lay a foundation 
for the most dangerous political favoritism and universal cor- 
ruption ; " and if it be really " incapable of any modification 
which would justify its adoption ; " — let it be rejected. These 
opinions of the committee, however, as I have before suggested, 
appear to me exceedingly extravagant. I have seen no occa- 
sion for such a hue-and-cry against the plan, nor for such re- 
proaches upon its author ; and I have accordingly felt bound to 
say so, in utter disregard of any imputations to which such a 
course may subject me. 



THE 

CREDIT OF MASSACHUSETTS YINDICATED. 

A SPEECH DELIVEKED AT FAXEUIL HALL, AT A MEETIXG OF THE WHIGS 

OF BOSTON, OCTOBER 12, 1843. 



It is a pleasant sight, Mr. Cliairman, to see the Whigs of 
Boston once more assembled in such good numbers, and in such 
good spirits, to consult together for the renewed vindication of 
their long-cherished principles. It is grateful to reflect, too, that 
there is so much in the circumstances and signs of the times to 
justify the animation which seems to pervade this meeting. The 
tidings which have come to us during the past week, from our 
friends in other parts of the country, are certainly of the most 
encouraging and cheering character. They have come upon us 
with something of the suddenness of an electric shock ; and as 
the spark has coursed along our veins, and vibrated upon our 
heart-strings, we have felt a fresh assurance that the bonds which 
have so long united the Whigs of the Union as brethren, are not 
yet broken. I trust that these tidings will have an influence 
beyond this hour and beyond these walls. I trust that the great 
principles of the Whig party will be commended anew to the 
consideration of every citizen in the Commonwealth ; that they 
will be pondered afresh and more deeply than ever before, in the 
field and in the counting-room, over the plough and over the 
spindle and at the fireside, in view of every thing that con- 
cerns the business or comes home to the hearts of the people ; 
and that the second Monday of November will find not only city 
responding to city, Boston to Baltimore, — but State answer- 
ing to State, Massachusetts giving assurance to Maryland and 
to Georgia, that in the North and East, as well as in the South 



376 THE CREDIT OF MASSACHUSETTS VINDICATED. 

and centre, the old Whig watch-fires are once more kindled — 
the old Whig spirit once more roused ! 

The resolutions which have just been read, relate almost exclu- 
sively to the politics of Massachusetts ; and it has been thought 
best, by those who have been selected to conduct the affairs of 
the Whig party during the present year, and to whose peculiar 
province it belongs to draw up the plan of our annual campaign, 
that the contest for which we are assembled to prepare, should be 
conducted mainly with reference to the administration of our 
own Commonwealth. There is a great and manifest propriety 
in this course. It is a plan of proceeding entirely reasonable 
and eminently seasonable. The present year aff'ords us a pecu- 
liarly fit and favorable opportunity for attending to the aff'airs of 
our own Commonwealth, and one which may not soon occur 
again. The approaching election is exclusively a State election. 
In some few of the districts, it is true, the people will be called 
on to make fresh trials for the election of Representatives in 
Congress, owing to their unfortunate failures to effect a choice 
at the regular period. But here, certainly, — and I may take 
occasion to express my deep gratitude for any thing of personal 
confidence or kindness which may in any humble degree have 
contributed to the result, — here we have no such failures to 
retrieve. The Whigs of Boston may sometimes be reproached 
for not making their majority large enough to counterbalance 
the minorities of their neighbors, in the general returns of the 
State, — a reproach which I trust they will not subject themselves 
to again this year, — but they rarely fail to do up their own work 
fairly and fully on the regular day. In Boston, therefore, and in 
this part of the Commonwealth generally, the people will be called 
on, at the ensuing election, to vote exclusively for State officers. 
Next year, as I need hardly remind you, we shall enjoy no such 
unmixed opportunity of expressing our minds as to the adminis- 
tration of our State affairs. Next year, the great quadrennial 
contest of the Presidency will be upon us. I will not anticipate 
its arrival. " Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof." But 
this I may safely predict of it, — that it will come back to us 
under circumstances which more, even, than ever before, will 
absorb all our thoughts and engross our whole attention. 

There will be no chance for looking after local politics, in the 



THE CREDIT OF MASSACHUSETTS VINDICATED. 377 

hurly-burly of the next Presidential struggle. Not until tiiat 
" hurly-burly 's done," not until that " battle 's lost or won," when 
it has once opened, shall we be in a condition to look to any issues 
less broad than those which concern the whole country. Now, 
then, while we have opportunity, let us look at home. Now, 
then, while we may, let us remember, that let what will happen to 
the Nation at large, — let who will be permitted, either by any 
dispensation of Providence, or by any delusion of the people, to 
defeat or disappoint the just expectations of the Nation, — we 
have here a community of our own, institutions of our own, 
an administration of our own, embracing within the sphere of 
its influence the nearest and dearest interests of ourselves and 
our children, for the purity and preservation of which we, and 
we alone, are responsible. Now then, I repeat it, if there be any 
thing wrong in the condition of old Massachusetts; if any 
breach has been made in the walls and fences of the old home- 
stead ; if any strip and waste has been committed on the old 
family premises; if any trespassers have invaded our firesides, 
and overthrown, or threatened to overthrow, our verv altars and 
household gods ; now, now is the time for restoration and 
redress. 

And how is it with our beloved Commonwealth ? How has 
it fared with her during the past year, and how is it with her 
now? Who are in possession of her high places, how have they 
come there, and how have they manifested their title to the con- 
tinued support and confidence of the people ? 

Strange scenes — strange scenes, certainly, have been wit- 
nessed, and strange sounds heard, within the walls of the capitol 
of Massachusetts during the last year. It is my fortune, — I 
should rather say, I owe it to your favor, — to have witnessed 
these scenes from a distance ; but distance, I assure you, has lent 
no enchantment to the view. No true son of Massachusetts, no 
one who has a true sense of what belongs to her character and her 
honor, could have read the proceedings of her Legislature, or of 
her Executive, during the last winter, however distant he may 
have been from the scene of action, and however free from any 
mere party preferences or prejudices, without feeling his blood 
burning in his cheek and tingling to his fingers' ends. The cir- 

32 * 



378 THE CREDIT OF MASSACHUSETTS VINDICATED. 

cumstances which attended the organization of the government ; 
the utter disregard for the dignity of the Senate, manifested by 
the majority in forcing into the Presidential chair, against his 
will, a person confessedly incompetent to discharge its duties, 
and who was compelled to abandon his post within a week after 
his election ; the systematic attempt to snauggle into the other 
branch of the Legislature an irregular and illegal vote, for the 
purpose of securing a party majority in the choice of a Speaker; 
the mingled corruption and treachery by which the majority 
in joint ballot was but too plainly procured ; the summary ex- 
pulsion from office of such men as then occupied the posts of 
Secretary and Treasurer, and the hunt which was obliged to be 
instituted for a responsible person to take charge of the public 
moneys, reminding us almost of the old philosopher wdth his 
lantern, hunting for an honest man ; — these, with their accom- 
panying incidents, were enough to fill with disgust and indigna- 
tion all, all, who had hearts for the prosperity and honor of 
the Old Bay State. 

And yet they formed, after all, but the appropriate prelude to 
the mingled tragedy and farce which followed. They were but 
the fitting overture to that series of Legislative and Executive 
acts, which signalized the triumph of the false democracy over 
the true. They formed, especially, but the becoming introduc- 
tion to that Executive message with which the serious business 
of the session commenced. Not soon shall I forget the emo- 
tions with which I perused the late message of Governor Mor- 
ton, on its arrival in Washington. Not soon shall I forget the 
indignant expressions of my honorable and excellent friend, the 
late member from Salem, (Mr. Saltonstall,) who chanced to be 
at my elbow when the mail brought it in to us at midnight, as 
I read it aloud to him. Five hundred miles away from home, 
associated with the representatives of other States, we had 
something of that sensitiveness on the subject of old Massa- 
chusetts, something of that jealousy as to every thing which 
might affect her reputation and renown, which travellers in a 
foreign country are wont to feel as to the native land they have 
left behind them. And what was our humiliation at hearing 
from her own Council Chamber, as from authority, such per- 



THE CREDIT OF MASSACHUSETTS VINDICATED. 379 

versions of her past history, such reproaches upon her present 
condition, such an abuse of her previous rulers, such insinua- 
tions as to her credit, such imputations upon her integrity, such 
an impeachment of her honesty I If it had been a stranger who 
had said these things we could have borne it. No — let me not 
say so — we could not have borne it. If any citizen of another 
State had uttered such a tirade against old Massachusetts, if 
a member of Congress from any other part of the country had 
indulged in such reproaches upon her policy and principles, 
we should have felt, — every one of the Massachusetts members 
of Congress, (Mr. Parmenter, I am sure, not excepted,) would 
have felt, — that it must not pass unanswered and unrebuked. 
Our constituents, of both parties, would not have held us guilt- 
less, for suffering it to go by in silence. But it was no stranger; 
it was our brother ; our fellow-citizen ; our chosen Chief Magis- 
trate, with the highest honors of the Commonwealth frcbhly 
cast upon him, — with the robes of office in their newest gloss 
upon his back. What a return for honors conferred I And 
what an inducement, too, — what a consideration, for a renewal 
of those honors now ! Why, fellow-citizens, the citizen of Mas- 
sachusetts who should now approach Governor Morton to lend 
him his support, as he presents himself again for our suffrages — 
after the libels he has uttered on the character of the Common- 
wealth — must approach him, I should imagine, in something 
of the spirit in which Shakspeare's Shylock represents himself 
as approaching the Merchant of Venice to lend him moneys: — 

" He should bend low, and in a bondman's key, 
"With 'bated breath, and whispering humbleness, 
Say this — 

Fair Sir, you spit on me on "Wednesday last. 
You spurned me such a day ; — another time 
You called me dog, and for these courtesies 
I '11 give you my vote. You shall be our Governor." 

Mr. Chairman, I have no purpose to enter into any detailed 
analysis of the late Governor's Message, or of the Legisla- 
tive proceedings by which it was followed. This work has 
been done, ably, admirably done, already, by those who have 
had far gi-eater opportunities than myself, — by those who have 



380 THE CREDIT OF MASSACHUSETTS VINDICATED. 

related things which they saw, and part of which they were. 
But I shall be pardoned for dwelling on one or two of the points 
in the message of Governor Morton, and in the conduct of his 
party in the Legislature, which have impressed themselves most 
deeply on the mind of one who has looked on at a distance. 

And first, I desire to say a word as to the language of 
the Governor, in relation to our State credit. Sir, if there has 
been any thing as to which the people of this Commonwealth 
have felt, and have had a right to feel, a true and lively satisfac- 
tion, a just and generous pride, during the past ten years, it has 
been the credit of Massachusetts at home and abroad. We 
have seen the scrip of the Commonwealth, as is well said in these 
resolutions, first among the foremost in the world ; always com- 
mending itself to the confidence of capitalists ; often selling 
where no other scrip could find a market ; often sought for 
when it was not to be found ; and, in the worst of times, com- 
manding a higher price than that of any other State in the 
Union. No delay to pay interest, no denial of the obligation to 
pay principal, elsewhere, — no repudiation, expressed or implied, 
has sensibly affected its value. The mildewed ears of other 
States have not been able to blast their wholesome brother here ! 
Let me recount a little incident, which is only one among a 
hundred within every body's knowledge, to illustrate the estima- 
tion in which Massachusetts stock is held. I remember being 
called from my seat by a distinguished foreigner, of great intel- 
ligence, last winter, to converse with him about the credit of the 
States ; and I remember the pride I felt when he told me, that 
after a careful examination of the whole subject, he had come to 
the conclusion that Massachusetts stock was the best State stock 
in the world, and that, although he had invested his funds hereto- 
fore in the stock of a State in which the name of repudiation had 
never been breathed, and where interest and principal had always 
been punctually paid, he had determined to sell out this stock at 
a discount, and buy in Massachusetts stock, even at a premium. 
There was one other stock, he did, indeed, say that he should 
have preferred. It was not a State stock, and the mention of it 
in no degree alloyed my satisfaction ©r diminished my pride. It 
was the stock of the good old city of Boston, — which, he said, 



THE CREDIT OF MASSACHUSETTS VINDICATED. 381 

was the very best in the world ; but as this could not be pro- 
cured for love or money, and as he wished to feel perfectly safe 
and easy in leaving a little money behind him, while he made a 
visit to his own home, he was resolved to obtain the stock of 
Massachusetts at any sacrifice which might be necessary. 

But what was the language of our own Governor in regard 
to this State stock of ours in his last message ? "I cannot 
refrain from the expression of my apprehension, (says he,) that 
the investment of it (the School Fund) in the scrip of the Com- 
monwealth, may endanger its ultimate safety." And he then 
proceeded seriously to submit to the wisdom of the Legislature, 
whether a different investment of that fund might not be safer. 
Something safer than the bond of Massachusetts ! Something 
more reliable than the honor and faith of the old Puritan State ! 
And this, too, from one who has had the undeserved distinction 
of affixing his signature to great numbers of these bonds, as 
Governor of the Commonwealth ! I trust that his wish was not 
father to this thought ! I trust that no willingness, no desire, no 
determination to have the old forebodings of himself and his 
party, as to these loans of credit, fulfilled, has led to such an 
expression. I trust in Heaven, that this idea has not been 
advanced in this message, to prepare the way for the doctrine of 
repudiation in the next ! Prepare the way, do I say I With 
grief and shame I pronounce it, the late Message of Governor 
Morton seems to me not only to have prepared the way, but to 
have advanced the doctrine outright, — certainly to have implied 
it, with a distinctness which admits of no misinterpretation or 
mistake. What does he say further, in regard to this School 
Fund of ours ? Let me read the very words, for fear of being 
thought to misquote or pervert. " Should any of the Corpora- 
tions (he says) to whom this scrip has been loaned, fail to pay 
the interest or the principal when due, the only security — mark 
it, ^'the only security^^ — which the School Fund would have, 
would consist in the will of the Legislature, to impose an annual 
tax, to be paid to the several towns for the support of the town 
schools." Not a word here about the solemn obligation of the 
State to redeem her scrip, her whole scrip, — to pay interest 
and principal, both to the uttermost farthing, whenever and 



382 THE CREDIT OF MASSACHUSETTS VINDICATED. 

wherever due, without regard to the persons by whom it is held, 
or the purposes to which it may have been devoted I Not a 
syllable of all this. Nothing of that manly, honest, high-toned 
assertion of the inviolability of State Faith, which has been 
accustomed to be heard, and which always ought to be heard, 
from the high places of Massachusetts. But, on the contrary, 
the idea is deliberately held out, that if the Railroads should not 
pay, the scrip would become worthless, the School Fund would 
be lost forever, and the only relief for the cause of Education, 
would rest on the discretion of the Legislature, manifesting itself 
by annual appropriations in its behalf. Gentlemen, I was about 
to say that this was repudiation in disguise ; but the more I 
think of it, and the oftener I read it, the more it seems to be 
repudiation without any disguise whatever — so plain and so 
palpable, that he who runs may read, — so naked and so unblush- 
ing, that he who reads would almost be ready to run I 

Indeed, there is a refinement on the common and ordinary 
doctrine of repudiation, in this message of Governor Morton, 
which has had no precedent, and which I venture to say, w^ill 
have no parallel, elsewhere. What is the real gist of this sug- 
gestion as to the School Fund, when stripped of its specious 
phraseology, and presented nakedly to the view ? It is nothing 
less than this, — that the State should take measures, without 
delay, to get rid of any of its own scrip, which it may happen to 
have on hand, in contemplation of voluntary bankruptcy, in the 
very view, and almost with the purpose of repudiation; — that 
the State should put off, as fast as possible, upon others, its own 
notes of hand, for fear they should become worthless ! What an 
idea is this, for the Governor of Massachusetts to advance. Why, 
the beauties of modern banking afford nothing richer than this ! 
The raciest annals of modern financiering, furnish nothing more 
racy ! Change the investment of your School Fund, says the 
Governor, and sell off" to others — to the ignorant or unwary 
foreigner, whose friendship to your country and its liberties, may 
have given him a confidence in its credit — your own stock, 
which you are afraid to keep yourself! What a recommenda- 
tion ! And this under cover of a most laudable concern for Educa- 
tion and the Public Schools. In Heaven's name let not the holy 



THE CREDIT OF MASSACHUSETTS VINDICATED. 383 

cause of Education be associated with such dishonor! Do not 
let it be heard of, that our common schools, the pride and glory 
of the State, have been sustained and saved from overthrow, — if 
indeed their preservation depends at all upon the School Fund, — 
by such an indirection ! Let not, above all things, our children 
hear it even whispered, that the funds by which they are edu- 
cated, were not only considered unsafe while invested in the 
solemn obligations of the State, but that the investment was 
changed in order to shift the losses of State bankruptcy and 
State repudiation on other shoulders. Rather than such an ex- 
ample of dishonest thrift should be connected with the sacred 
institutions of education, let the School Fund perish, and I had 
almost said the schools with it. I would not undervalue the 
cause of sound scholarship, nor depreciate the importance of any 
foundation for disseminating it among our children ; but if the 
alternative be whether the fund shall be lost forever, or such an 
act of dishonor be committed, I cannot hesitate for an instant. 
The education which should come from a fund so saved, would 
come, like the knowledge of good and evil to our first parents, 
clothed with a curse I 

Sir, the character of our Commonwealth ; its ancient reputa- 
tion and renown ; its hitherto unsullied and unsuspected honesty ; 
its unimpeached and unimpeachable good faith ; the examples of 
its good men and its good deeds ; — these are themselves an 
education to our children I They constitute a part, and no in- 
considerable part, of that high moral education, compared with 
which the best learning of the schools is hardly worth the sweep- 
ings of the halls in which it is communicated. Let not the force of 
these influences and these examples be impaired. Let the School 
Fund stay where it is, and if there be any danger — which I totally 
deny — that repudiation could ever become the policy of Massa- 
chusetts, this very investment may arrest such a danger. Our 
interest in education will come in aid of our State pride. Our 
love for our children will mingle with our love of honor and our 
obligations of conscience, and will save us from plunging the 
State into such irretrievable disgrace. And, let me add, that 
if the School Fund be not safe in the scrip of the State, it is safe 
nowhere. If our love of honor is once lost, our love of education 



384 THE CREDIT OF MASSACHUSETTS VINDICATED. 

will soon follow. Once repudiate our honest debts, and, even 
were this School Fund saved from the wreck now, at the very- 
next temptation it would be diverted from the purposes of its 
establishment. Repudiation, once admitted and entertained, will 
contaminate our whole system, — will infect our entire policy. It 
will be that first step which costs, and its cost will be our whole 
character. 

Let us, then, rebuke the first suggestion of such a doctrine. Let 
us prove to Governor Morton, at the next election, that he cannot 
cast suspicions upon the good name of the Commonwealth, and 
propose measures which would more than justify those suspi- 
cions, with impunity. Let the man who desires something 
safer than our State scrip, be taught that he must seek some 
safer place than the Executive Chair for saying so ! 

Mr. Chairman, the course of remark of his Excellency, in rela- 
tion to the credit of the State and the safety of the School Fund, 
is, after all, only a fair illustration of the spirit which pervades 
his whole message; — a spirit, which I cannot characterize 
in more courteous terms, than to say that it is one of unscrupu- 
lous perversion and misrepresentation for mere party purposes; 
a spirit, which sticks not at defaming the Commonwealth itself, 
and dishonoring it before the world, for the sake of casting 
reproach upon other parties and previous administi'ations, and 
of attempting to magnify the merits and to prolong the period 
of his own ; a spirit which seems to regard truth, honor, faith, 
even the old trophies of our fathers' glory, every thing, as indif- 
ferent, save personal or party supremacy, and which considers 
these as cheaply purchased, by almost any amount of impo- 
sition and pretence. 

We see this spirit displayed again in relation to the annual 
expenditures of the State, — in that flagrant misstatement, more 
especially, that the State had expended more than twelve hun- 
dred thousand dollars, during the last eight years, over and above 
its receipts, and was actually in debt to that amount ; a declara- 
tion which has no other shadow of truth to rest upon, than the 
fact that the Commonwealth, during one of those eight years, 
saw fit to subscribe for a million dollars' worth of stock in the 
"Western Railroad. And this act, which took place under the 



THE CREDIT OF MASSACHUSETTS VINDICATED. 385 

lead of one of Governor Morton's own friends, — now, by some 
extraordinary political legerdemain, installed in the office which 
had been vacated by the proscription of the faithful and patriotic 
Lincoln, — this subscription, forsooth, is set down as an ordinary 
expenditure, and is relied upon as justifying the reproach upon 
the State, of having vastly exceeded her income. 

Sir, I have no idea of following the Governor through all these 
exaggerations and perversions on the subject of our State 
expenditures, but there is one view of these expenditures which 
I desire briefly to present to you. 

How is it, let me ask, how is it, that the aggregate of State 
outlay and State liability have been so augmented within the 
last eight or ten years ? It has been, as every body knows, by 
appropriations to the erection of Insane Hospitals, to the sup- 
port of Asylums for the blind and the deaf and dumb, to the 
encouragement of our volunteer militia, to the agricultural, geo- 
logical, and territorial surveys of the State, and to the con- 
struction of that system of railroads, which has made every man 
in the State the neighbor of every other man, and the State 
itself the neighbor of every other State. These have been the 
objects upon which the public liberality has been so largely 
bestowed. 

Now, Sir, our opponents are not to be permitted to sit on two 
stools, or to ride on two hobbies at the same time. It is against 
reason, it is against nature. They are not to be permitted to 
justify and eulogize the object of an expenditure, and yet to 
disavow and denounce the expenditure itself. They must either 
approve both, or condemn both. They cannot be permitted to 
claim the credit of parsimony and liberality, of economy and* 
generosity, in the same breath. They must either hate the one 
and love the other, or they must hold to the one and despise the 
other. It is as true of institutions and of improvements as of 
individuals, " you take my life when you take the means I have 
to live." And they are to be allowed no credit for the existence 
of public works, on the strength of mere vague and indefinite 
eulogies of them, after they are completed, who cease not to 
decry the means by which alone they could have been under- 
taken. Let, then, the friends of Governor Morton choose which 

33 



886 THE CREDIT OF MASSACHUSETTS VINDICATED. 

horn of the dilemma they will. Will they be content to be stig- 
matized as the enemies of these noble charities, of these bene- 
ficent institutions, of these magnificent public improvements, 
which have illustrated the policy of the Commonwealth during 
the last ten years, — or will they consent to take their share of 
the responsibility for whatever of liability or outlay they may 
have cost? One thing or the other they must do. And for one, 
as a Massachusetts Whig, I care not a straw which. I wish to 
divide the responsibility of this portion of our State policy with 
no party that is not willing — nay, that does not desire — to share 
it. It is as much as ever that I am willing to divide it with those 
who do. I adopt the idea of a celebrated ancient lawgiver, 
who, when he was arraigned for extravagance, declared that he 
would gladly submit to the charge, if all the noble works to 
which the public moneys had been appropriated could be in- 
scribed with his own name, instead of being called by the name 
of the city over which he had presided ! Yes, let all the noble 
institutions, and edifices, and enterprises, and improvements, 
which have been aided by the appropriations of State money 
or State credit, be called by the name of the Whig party, and 
be admitted as exclusively the results of Whig policy, and our 
opponents may carp and cavil and rail at the cost as much as 
they please. Why, what is the paltry debt, or even the more 
considerable liability of Massachusetts, when compared with the 
value of the objects for which they have been incurred and con- 
tracted? Is there a man here, is there a man in Massachusetts, 
who would undo all that has been done for the relief of suffer- 
ing, for the promotion of science, for the ascertainment of the 
real resources and rightful boundaries of the State, and for facili- 
tating the intercourse of our citizens and the interchange of their 
commodities, for the sake of wiping off" the little debt of the 
State? There are many men who will say that they would do 
so, for mere party effect. But if the thing were possible; if by 
the rubbing of some Aladdin's lamp, our hospitals and asylums 
could be razed to the ground, and their now happy inmates be 
remanded to the destitution and the dungeons from which they 
have been rescued ; if by the utterance of some magic phrase, 
some "presto — change," our railroads could be annihilated, the 



THE CREDIT OP MASSACHUSETTS VINDICATED. 387 

rocks and hills be again exalted between us and Albany, the 
valleys again be made low, the straight be made crooked and 
the plain places rough ; is there a man in the Commonwealth 
who would take the responsibility of the act, in order to cancel 
the few millions of State bonds which have been issued to pay 
for them ? Until such a man be found, let us hear no more of 
these absurd and hypocritical lamentations over the loans and 
liabilities of Massachusetts. 

I had intended, Mr. Chairman, to allude to other parts of the 
Governor's Message, and to other features of the policy of his 
supporters. I had proposed, especially, to allude to that assault 
which was made, at the last session of the Legislature, upon the 
independence of the judiciary by the unconstitutional act which 
was so rashly adopted for reducing the salary of the judges. I 
wished, also, to have borne my humble testimony to the charac- 
ters and qualifications of our candidates for Governor and 
Lieutenant-Governor, — George N. Briggs and John Reed, — 
men with whom it has been my privilege and my pride to be 
associated in the Councils of the Nation, and for whom I enter- 
tain the most profound respect, as well as the warmest personal 
regard. But there will be opportunities hereafter. Other gen- 
tlemen are present to address this meeting, and I hasten to make 
way for them. Let me not conclude, however, without a closing 
word of appeal. It has been quite too common, I am aware, 
for politicians to call every thing a crisis, and the phrase has 
almost passed into a byword. But critical periods in the history 
of Commonwealths do nevertheless occur, and it would be a 
fatal delusion, if we did not feel and realize that such a period 
has now arrived in the history of Massachusetts. This old Com- 
monwealth of ours has hitherto occupied a proud and lofty 
position in the eyes of the world. It has exercised an influence, 
not easily to be exaggerated, on the destinies of the nation. 
There has been a stability about her institutions, a steadiness 
in the character of her people, a consistency in her political 
course, an unyielding devotion to the cause of liberty and law, 
which have given her a name and a praise in all the land. Yes, 
the old Pine Tree, from the earliest day in which our Fathers 
transplanted it to these shores, and adopted it as the emblem of 



388 THE CREDIT OF MASSACHUSETTS VINDICATED. 

their infant Republic, has been seen standing in ever-during ver- 
dure, — broken by no blast of adversity, withered by no heat of 
prosperity, still striking its roots deeper and deeper in the storm, 
still lifting its branches higher and higher in the sunshine ! But 
an unfilial hand is now raised against it. Sir, Massachusetts 
will cease to be Massachusetts, if the policy of her existing ad- 
ministration shall be permanently sustained. Her name may be 
left, her place on the map may be unaltered, her territory may be 
unchanged, and the monuments of the noble deeds of her Fathers 
may still stand thick on her hills and plains ; but if such a policy 
is to prevail in- her councils, her glory will be a merely historical 
glory ; her honor will belong only to the records of the past ! 
She will cease to be that Massachusetts which we have so 
long loved and respected ; that Massachusetts which has been 
pronounced "the Model State" by foreign travellers; that Mas- 
sachusetts, which has extorted the homage of an ill-disguised 
envy, even from those few of her sister States, from whom she 
has failed in winning the tribute of admiration and affection ! 

Let us, then, redeem her, before it is too late. Let us rescue 
her, while she is still worthy of being rescued. Let us resolve 
to place her once more in a position, in which she may be true 
to herself, true to her own character and her own children, and 
true to the whole country ! Let us restore her now to a con- 
dition, which shall not only give assurance that her own 
Constitution shall be maintained, her own credit vindicated, her 
own honor upheld, but that a majority of her citizens shall be in 
readiness, when the great National line shall be again formed in 
May next, to march with unbroken ranks to their old place 
under the old Whig banner, and to do battle under whatever 
commander may be selected to lead us on to victory ! 



THE EIGHT OF TETITION. 

A SPEECH DELIVERED IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES OF THE UNI- 
TED STATES, JANUARY 23, 1844. 



Mr. Speaker, — 

It seems to have been the fortune of this House to be 
employed, during no inconsiderable part of the time since 
the present session commenced, in discussing what are called 
first principles. For eight or ten days, not long since gone 
by, we were occupied with the consideration of that great writ 
of personal liberty, the Habeas Corpus. And, in the course of 
that discussion, doctrines were advanced, in some quarters of 
the House, to my mind not a little strange and startling, and 
upon which I desired at the time to have made some comments 
But, in common with many other gentlemen better entitled to 
a hearing, I attempted in vain to obtain the floor for that pur- 
pose. We have now been engaged, during the morning hour of 
many days, in a debate on a second great principle of civil 
liberty, — the Right of Petition. And upon this subject opi- 
nions have been expressed, and positions maintained, which are 
even more extraordinary and more startling ; and from which I 
am glad of an opportunity to declare my utter dissent. 

The idea, that the right of petition does not imply the right 
of having a petition received! The doctrine, that the right of 
the people to apply to the government for redress of grievances 
does not involve any obligation on the part of the government 
to heed, or even hear, that application I The position which has 
been seriously maintained here, that all that was ever intended 
by the right of petition, was the right of individuals or of assem- 
blies to prepare and sign a paper, setting forth the grievances 

33* 



o90 THE RIGHT OF PETITION. 

under which they are suffering, and the redress which they seek ; 
and that it was no part of that intention to secure to that paper 
any consideration or entertainment whatever from those to whom 
it is addressed ! Why, Sir, these doctrines seem to me about as 
reasonable as it would be to contend, that the privilege of the 
writ of Habeas Corpus implies no obligation on the part of the 
officer to whom it is directed to regard or obey the writ, and no 
duty on the part of the government to execute or enforce it ; but 
that it is only designed to secure to an imprisoned citizen the 
satisfaction of having the writ itself, duly signed and attested, to 
amuse himself with in his solitary confinement, — to meditate 
upon by day, or to put under his pillow to dream upon by night ! 
They seem to me about as reasonable as it would be to maintain, 
that the freedom of the press extends only to the freedom of the 
mechanical enginery of the press ; that it was only intended to 
secure the rights of individual printers to compose, set up, and 
strike off, such matter as might be agreeable to them ; but that 
it does not reach to the privilege of publishing or circulating 
that matter after it is struck off! In a word, Mr. Speaker, if 
the right of petition is really nothing more than it has been 
represented to be by some of the honorable members who have 
preceded me in this debate, it is, in my judgment, as poor a pre- 
tence, as miserable a mockery, as empty and unmeaning and 
worthless an abstraction, as was ever dignified by a swelling 
name or a high-sounding title; and the sooner it is expunged 
from the roll of civil liberty, the sooner it ceases to hold out to 
the ear a promise only to be broken to the hope, the sooner will 
the people understand what rights they really do possess. 

But, Sir, 'I desire to proceed with this subject a little more 
methodically, and to notice with something more of precision 
and exactness the arguments which have been adduced in favor 
of these doctrines. 

The question before the House is, whether the rule, which has 
obtained a most odious notoriety, in many quarters of the coun- 
try, under the name of the twenty-first rule, and which has lost 
nothing of its offensiveness by recently assuming the alias of the 
twenty-third rule, shall remain as one of the permanent rules 
and orders of the present Congress. This is the question plainly 



THE EIGHT OF PETITION. 391 

presented in the instructions which have been moved by the 
honorable member from Georgia (Mr. Black;) and this is the 
question no less plainly involved in the simple motion to recom- 
mit the report. And what is this rule ? It is a rule providing 
that no petitions, resolutions, memorials, or other papers, on cer- 
tain enumerated subjects, shall be received by this House, or 
entertained in any way whatever. Now, Sir, I care not what 
those enumerated subjects are. I hold it entirely unimportant 
to this argument to state them. Whatever they may be, the 
principle of the rule is, in my judgment, the same. If this 
House may declare to-day that it will receive no petitions on 
one class of subjects, it may to-morrow declare that it will re- 
ceive no petitions on another class of subjects; and, on the third 
day, it may refuse to receive any petitions at all. The real 
inquiry is, have we a right to prescribe to those who have sent us 
here on what particular subjects their prayers shall be heard in 
these halls ? Is it within our prerogative to say to the people of 
the United States — " Gentlemen, you may assemble together 
in what numbers you please, to consult upon what you may 
choose to consider your grievances ; you may sign your peti- 
tions individually or collectively ; you may adopt resolutions in 
your primary meetings, or in your legislative assemblies ; but if 
those petitions or resolutions contain any allusion to this, that, 
or the other topic, we will not receive them, or entertain them 
in any way whatever ? " 

Sir, I utterly deny the existence of any such right on our part. 
I hold it to be inconsistent with the relations we sustain to our 
constituents. I hold it to be unwarranted by any thing either 
in the reason or the history of parliamentary proceedings. I 
hold it to be in direct conflict with the spirit and intent of ex- 
press provisions of the Constitution. And I hold it, also, to be 
subversive of original, inherent, and inalienable rights of the 
people. 

The honorable member from Tennessee, (Mr. A. V. Brown,) 
in justifying this rule, a few mornings ago, drew an analogy 
from the relations of parent and child ; and, in the application 
of this analogy, this House was made to play the part of the 
parent, and the people were left to sustain the character of the 



392 THE RIGHT OF PETITION. 

child ! It was a good illustration, Sir, of the sort of reasoning by 
which this rule must be defended, if it is to be defended at all. 
But this House does not stand in loco parentis to the people of 
the United States. We are not their parents, masters, or 
guardians. We are sent here to ascertain their wishes ; to carry 
out their will ; to do their work. And for us to undertake to 
limit their liberty to address us, or abridge their privilege of 
being heard here, on any subjects on which they may choose to be 
heard, is to reverse entirely our relative positions. It is the repre- 
sentative instructing the constituent ; the agent prescribing terms 
to his principal ; the servant imposing conditions on the master! 
I shall be told that individual petitioners are not the people ; 
and that the rights of the signers of petitions, few or many, are 
not to be confounded with the rights of the people at large. 
There would be some fitness and some force in this suggestion, 
if we were considering the reception of a single petition, or of 
any ascertained number of petitions. But where is the limit to 
this rule ? Where is the limit to the principle of this rule ? 
Why, Sir, this rule excludes, practically and daily, thousands 
and hundreds of thousands of petitioners. It denies a hear- 
ing, practically and daily, to whole States — sovereign States 
— speaking through the resolutions of their Legislatures. The 
Journals, I think, will show that the resolutions of four or 
five States have been thrust back into the faces of their repre- 
sentatives on this floor, in a single hour of a single morning. 
And if as many States as were arrayed here the other day on 
the subject of General Jackson's fine, — seventeen, I think, — 
could come to a common opinion on any point connected with 
any one of the subjects enumerated in this rule, — nay, if all the 
States in the Union, or all the people of all the States, could 
come, as they ought to come, and as I believe that one day or 
other they will come, to the conclusion, that whatever may be done 
with the institution of slavery in the District of Columbia, the 
slave trade here shall be no more tolerated, but that this metro- 
polis of the American Republic shall be purged from the pollu- 
tion of an inhuman and abominable traffic, — this rule is broad 
enough, and general enough, to deny a hearing to them all ! In 
principle, then, this rule goes the full length of asserting the 



THE RIGHT OF PETITION. 393 

right of this House, to say to the people, to the whole people of 
the Union — " Come one, come all, we will not hear you." 

But, says the gentleman from South Carolina, (]\Ir. Rhett,) 
have we not a plenary power, under the Constitution, " to deter- 
mine our own rules of proceeding?" Yes, Sir, we have that 
power, and there is no appeal from our determination as to those 
rules. But power is one thing, and right is another. We have 
the power to do many things in this House which we have yet 
no manner of right to do. We are the final judges of the elec- 
tions and returns of our own members. And if a majority in 
this House, in its wilfulness or its wantonness, should see fit to 
give the seat in a contested election to a candidate clearly in a 
minority, or to admit to a right of membership on this floor 
persons under twenty-five years of age, or who have resided less 
than seven years in the United States, or persons who do not 
possess any other of the constitutional or legal qualifications of 
members, — and something of this sort has been done, as I think, 
at this very session, — there is no power elsewhere to revise or 
reverse our decision. We have the power, also, to adopt a rule 
of proceeding by which the yeas and nays shall not be recorded 
on a call of one fifth of the members present, or shall not be 
recorded at all ; and, indeed, a majority of this House almost 
went this length at the outset of the session, in excluding from 
the records a full and intelligible statement of a question on 
which the yeas and nays were demanded and taken. We have the 
power, too, to suppress or expunge from our Journals any pro- 
ceedings which we may not fancy to have the people find recorded 
there ; and this proceeding, again, is not entirely unknown to this 
Capitol, or even to this House during the present session. But 
who can assert that we have any right to resort to such mea- 
sures, in defiance of express provisions of the Constitution? 
Sir, it is plain that this power to determine the rules of our own 
proceeding must be held in subordination to other provisions of 
the Constitution, and must be exercised also with a due regard 
to the rights, the reserved or inherent rights, of the people. Our 
power over our own rules of proceeding is, indeed, an irrespon- 
sible power. But this consideration should only make us the 
more anxious to ascertain what is its rightful and constitutional 



394 THE RIGHT OF PETITION. 

limit, and the more careful to keep ourselves strictly within that 
limit. 

It is contended, however, by the advocates of this rule, that it 
is not inconsistent with any provision in the Constitution, nor 
with any right of the people. The first article of the amend- 
ments to the Constitution, it is said, provides only that " Con- 
gress shall make no law abridging the right of the people to 
petition the government for a redress of grievances;" and this 
rule is not a law. Sir, this is sticking to the bark of the Con- 
stitution with a witness to it I Can it be seriously pretended 
that it is consistent with the spirit and intent of this clause, that 
one branch of Congress should effect, by a mere rule of proceed- 
ing, what both branches are prohibited from effecting by solemn 
statute ? If the Senate and House of Representatives and the 
President combined, can pass no law abridging the right of the 
people to petition the Government, is it not, a fortiori, incompe- 
tent for this House alone to abridge that right ? But I deny the 
propriety of this literal interpretation of the word laio in the ar- 
ticle in question. The first article of amendment, as it originally 
passed the House of Representatives in 1789, did not contain 
that word. Its phraseology was, — " the right of the people to 
apply to the Government for redress of grievances shall not be 
infringed." This is the real gist of the provision. The Senate, 
in incorporating some additional matter into the same article, 
found it necessary to change the construction of the sentence. 
But it was a change of construction only, and there is not the 
slightest ground for the idea, that any change of the sense or 
substance was intended. 

Why, Sir, this article of amendment, with many others, was 
adopted, as is well known, on the recommendation of a number 
of the State conventions, by which the Constitution was origin- 
ally ratified. And in what terms did those State conventions 
recommend it? In what terms did your own State of Virginia 
propose its adoption ? " Every freeman has a right to petition, 
or apply to the Legislature for the redress of grievances." This 
was the language of Virginia in 1789 ; and it was well said of it 
by Judge Tucker, in his appendix to Blackstone, that "it was 
the language of a free people asserting their rights," while the 



THE RIGHT OP PETITION. 395 

language of the Constitution, he adds, "savors of that style of 
condescension in which favors are supposed to be granted." 

But we are told by the gentleman from South Carolina, (Mr. 
Rhett,) and again by the gentleman from Alabama, (Mr. Belser,) 
that this article was adopted in contemplation of a particular 
mode of abridging the right of petition ; that it had reference to 
certain old English Riot Acts, which prohibited the people from 
assembling in tumultuous masses to petition the Government. 
Admit all that the gentlemen have said on this point. Admit 
that the language of this article was derived from the English 
Bill of Rights, and was originally aimed at some particular 
restraint upon the right in question. What then ? Is there any 
thing in the article which confines its application, now and at all 
times to come, to the particular mode of abridgment which first 
gave occasion to it ? Sir, the phraseology of the article is com- 
prehensive and general. It declares that the right of petition 
shall not be abridged by Congress; not that it shall not be 
abridged in one way, or in another way, but that it shall not be 
abridged at all. Gentlemen might as well contend that the 
general statute of murder was only designed to pjevent and 
punish those kinds of homicide which were in vogue when the 
statute was passed, as to contend that this article of the Consti- 
tution was only intended to prohibit those modes of abridging 
the right of petition which were contemplated at the time of its 
adoption. Upon this principle, if any ingenious villain could 
only discover' some new mode of putting an end to human life, 
it would be "killing — no murder I" Such a principle would 
make a farce of all legislation. 

But the honorable member from Alabama (Mr. Belser) has 
discovered sundry instances in which the British House of Com- 
mons have refused to receive petitions, and have even passed 
rules for refusing to receive them. And upon this discovery he 
has founded what he seemed to consider a most triumphant argu- 
ment in favor of the constitutionality of the rule of this House. 
The argument, if I understand it, is this : that the refusal to 
receive petitions at discretion, was a well-known practice of the 
British Parliament before the adoption of our Constitution ; that 
the framers of the Constitution rriust have understood and con- 



396 THE RIGHT OP PETITION. 

templated that practice ; and that, therefore, in default of any 
express allusion to it, there is no reason for imagining that it 
was intended to be reached or remedied by the article of amend- 
ment in question. 

Now, sir, I disagree to this argument altogether. I deny the 
correctness, both of the premises and of the conclusion. I main- 
tain, in precise opposition to it, that, in the first place, the right 
to present petitions to the Government, including the right to 
have these petitions received, was an old, original, inherent right 
of the people of Great Britain, acknowledged and allowed from 
a time "whereof the memory of man runneth not to the con- 
trary. I maintain, in the second place, that the framers of our 
Constitution understood and appreciated this inherent right. I 
maintain, in the third place, that the refusal to receive petitions 
in certain cases, in the British House of Commons, was an 
exception to the general principles and general practice of that 
body, arising out of circumstances peculiar to those cases, and 
furnishing no justification for the rule which is under considera- 
tion here. And I maintain, in the fourth plgce, that there is 
abundant reason for the assurance, that the framers of the Con- 
stitution would have been the last persons in the world to sanction 
such refusals, or to consider them as in any degree furnishing 
precedents for us to follow. I am aware. Sir, that it is not often 
easy to prove the affirmative of propositions of this kind. But 
if the House will bear with me a few moments, I think I can 
show them, at least, that I do not speak without book. 

And here, Mr. Speaker, if I had a whole morning before me, 
instead of the rapidly flying remnant of a little hour, I might 
bring to the remembrance of gentlemen not a few passages of 
English history of a most interesting and instructive character. 
I might go back to those great conflicts for civil liberty in the 
Old World, two centuries ago, by which our fathers were exer- 
cised and instructed for its establishment in the New. I misfht 
refer to days, on which thousands and tens of thousands of citi- 
zens were seen going up to Parliament, en masse, to present 
their petitions for redress ; days, when the constituents of the 
immortal John Hampden were seen riding up from Buckingham- 
shire, each one with a copy of" a famous protest which they had 



THE RIGHT OF PETITION". 397 

adopted in his hatband, to petition against ship-money, and to 
demand the release from imprisonment of their gallant and glo- 
rious Representative; days, when fifteen thousand women, headed 
by the wife of an honest brewer, were seen wending their way 
with a petition to the very doors of the House of Commons; and 
when those doors were thrown open to receive them ! And what 
was the moral of those scenes? Sir, in those days the champions 
of the popular cause relied greatly on the exercise of this right 
of petition to strengthen them in their struggles against the en- 
croachments and exactions of the Crown. Petitions to the 
Parliament and petitions to the King were then among the most 
important instruments of the popular movement. There was 
even a time when the friends of freedom assumed the party 
name of Petitioners, and when the friends of prerogative and 
power were known by the name of Abhorrers — abhorrers of peti- 
tions! and these names of Petitioners and Abhorrers were as 
common and as general as Whig and Tory afterwards were, 
and designated respectively the same party divisions. And there 
is one little anecdote of those days, which I cannot forbear recit- 
ing with greater exactness. It is the anecdote of a man, whose 
real name is not recorded on the page of history, but who gave 
a name to himself which will not soon be forgotten ; a man 
who seems to have foreshadowed something of the indomi- 
table spirit on the subject of the right of petition, which has 
been so often manifested on this iioor by my honored and vene- 
rable colleague (Mr. Adams ;) a man who went in person into 
the very presence of King Charles I., and presented to him a 
petition, complaining of some act of oppression and demanding 
redress. " How dare you," said the King, " present me such a 
petition?" " May it please your Majesty," said the man, "my 
name is BareJ^ He was rewarded for his boldness, not as my 
venerable colleague was on a well-remembered occasion, by a 
resolution of censure or impeachment, (^e^?«;i imbelle, sine ictii I) 
but by a heavy fine and a long-continued imprisonment. If I 
remember right. Sir, the first child born in the Jamestown colony 
was christened " Virginia Dare,'' and perhaps the name was in 
honor of this stout and sturdy old upholder of the right of peti- 
tion! This supposition, however, would involve a slight ana- 
34 



398 THE RIGHT OF PETITION. 

chronism, I fear, and must therefore be abandoned. I fear 
still more that most of the Dare family of Virginia of the 
present day would be disposed to renounce and disown such a 
namesake. 

But these historical reminiscences, pertinent as they are, do 
not come near enough to the point, to answer the purpose of my 
argument ; and I proceed to cite a case which will more clearly 
sustain the exact positions I have laid down. 

In the year 1668, one Mr. Thomas Skinner presented a peti- 
tion to the British House of Lords, complaining of certain 
oppressive acts of the East India Company. These acts were 
properly cognizable, it would seem, by the ordinary courts of 
law. But the Lords, notwithstanding, determined to assume 
jurisdiction, and decide upon them for themselves. The East 
India Company thereupon presented a petition to the House of 
Commons, complaining of the House of Lords, and denying 
their right to proceed in the premises. The Lords immediately 
took umbrage at this petition, as libellous and scandalous, as a 
breach of their privilege and an encroachment upon their prero- 
gative, and proceeded to punish Sir Samuel Bernardiston and 
other members of the company by fine and imprisonment. A 
long and angry dispute forthwith arose between the two branches 
of Parliament on this particular point : — how far petitions which 
were presented in the House of Commons could be taken notice 
of in the House of Lords or elsewhere ; and, in the course of this 
dispute, the right of petition generally underwent a strict and 
thorough investigation. Elaborate reports were made on both 
sides, and sundry resolutions were adopted. I find no detailed 
record of the reports, but among the resolutions adopted by the 
Commons were the following : 

" That it is an inherent right of every commoner of England to prepare and present 
petitions to the House of Commons, in case of grievances, and of the House of Com- 
mons to receive the same." 

" It hath been always, time out of mind, the constant and uncontroverted usage and 
custom of tlie House of Commons to liavc petitions presented to them from com- 
moners, in case of grievance, public or private ; in evidence whereof, it is one of the 
first works that is done by the House of Commons, to appoint a Grand Committee to 
receive petitions and informations of grievances." 

" In case men should be punishable in otiier courts for preparing and presenting 
petitions for redress of grievances to the House of Commons, it may discourage and 



THE RIGHT OF PETITION. 399 

deter His Majesty's subjects from seeking redress of their grievances, and by that means 
frustrate the main and principal end for which Parliaments were ordained." 

Sir, what fuller evidence could be given, what stronger testi- 
mony adduced, of the importance which was attached in those 
early days to this inherent right of petition, or of the inviolable 
sanctity which belonged to it ? What significance there is in 
the fact here stated, that " it is one of the first works that is 
done by the House of Commons, to appoint a grand committee 
to receive petitions and informations of grievances!" What an 
emphasis in the idea that " it may discourage and deter His 
Majesty's subjects from seeking redress of their grievances, and 
by that means frustrate the main 'and principal end for which 
Parliaments were ordained ! " I imagine that no gentleman 
will desire further evidence as to the first proposition which I 
undertook to establish. 

But where is the evidence that our fathers regarded this right 
of petition in the same light ? Why, Sir, it so happens that in 
the Congress of 1789, by which the amendments to the Consti- 
tution were agreed upon, this first article of amendment, which 
is in controversy in this debate, was the subject of some discus- 
sion. The adoption of it was opposed by some of the mem- 
bers of that Congress. But on what grounds was it opposed? 
Was it on the idea which has been held out in this debate, that 
it would be unbecoming in a free and sovereign people to pre- 
sent themselves in the attitude of petitioners to this House? 
Was it on the ground that the right of petition was not an 
American right, as was suggested by a gentleman from Penn- 
sylvania, I think, during the last Congress ? No. Our fathers 
of that day were fresh from the great conflicts and controversies 
of the Revolution, and they understood what American rights 
were, too well to broach such an idea as that. It was opposed 
on the ground that the right of petition already existed, and 
needed no new assertion. It was said that it was " a self-evi- 
dent, inalienable right, which the people possessed." It was 
said that " it would never be called in question." While, on 
the other hand, it was contended by the advocates of the amend- 
ment, that, although it was " an inherent, existing right," it 
would be well, from its very value, to give it the additional force 
and solemnity of a constitutional sanction. 



400 THE RIGHT OF PETITION. 

"The committee who framed this report (said Mr. Benson) proceeded on the prin- 
ciple that these rights belonged to the people. They conceived them to be inherent, 
and all that they meant to provide against was their being infringed by the govern- 
ment." 

Need I add any thing more, Sir, on the second proposition 
which I undertook to maintain? 

Let me hasten, then, to the principle of reception, and to those 
instances of refusal to receive, which have been cited by the 
honorable member from Alabama. 

And first let me bring to the notice of the House a fact of no 
little significance upon this point of my argument, which I find 
in the history of the East India Company case, already referred 
to. Among the other resolutions reported to the House of Com- 
mons on that occasion, was one in these words : — 

" That it is the undoubted right and privilege of the House of Commons to judge 
and determine touching the nature and matter of such petitions, how far they are fit or 
unfit to be received." 

I can imagine, Mr. Speaker, the triumphant tone in which 
this resolution would have been introduced to the notice of the 
House, had it fallen under the eye of any one of the advocates 
of the rule under debate. I confess that, at first, I was not a 
little perplexed by it myself. True, it was open to the remark, 
that it was reported in the spirit of a protest against the assump- 
tion of the House of Lords ; and the other resolutions, by which 
it was preceded and followed, gave ample reason for believing, 
that it was only designed to deny the right of any body but 
themselves, to judge as to petitions presented to the Commons, 
how far they were fit or unfit to be received. Still, the language 
of the resolution, as I have read it, is certainly not quite con- 
sistent with the doctrines I have undertaken to establish ; and I 
plainly perceive the satisfaction with which it has been heard in 
some quarters of the House. But what will gentlemen say 
when they learn that before this resolution was adopted, the 
word " received " was stricken out, upon formal motion, and the 
word "retained" inserted in its place I This, Sir, is the fact. 
Here is the record of it.* And no better proof could be fur- 
nished than is found in this deliberate change of phraseology, 

* See note on page 411. 



THE RIGHT OF PETITION. 401 

that those who made it were unwilling, after asserting so em- 
phatically the inherent right of every commoner of England to 
present petitions, to abridge and even annihilate that right in 
the next breath, by arrogating to themselves an unlimited right 
of judgment, how far these petitions were fit or unfit to be re- 
ceived. They claimed only the right to judge how far they 
were fit to be retained ; and to retain, I need not say, ex vi ter- 
mini, implies reception. 

But how is it with the examples which have been cited of a 
direct refusal to receive in later days, and with the standing 
rules of the House of Commons under which these examples 
have occurred ? 

It is true. Sir, that two rules of this character were adopted by 
that body more than a century ago. One of them to the effect, 
"that they would receive no petitions against a bill, actually 
pending, for imposing taxes or duties." The other, " that they 
would receive no petitions for grants or appropriations of money 
relating to public service not recommended by the Crown." 
Now, these are the only rules of the kind which have ever been 
known to the parliamentary proceedings of England ; and all 
. the cases in which petitions, respectful in their terms, have been 
refused a reception, are found to be ranged under the authority 
of these two rules. And how am I to substantiate my position, 
that these rules are exceptions to the general principles and 
general practice of Parliament, and furnish no justification of the 
rule of this House ? I shall summon to my aid, for this pur- 
pose, the great authority upon all questions of parliamentary 
proceeding, Mr. Hatsell; from whose well-known work Mr. Jef- 
ferson compiled his Manual, and to whom the highest acknow- 
ledgments are paid in the preface to that Manual. Let Mr. 
Hatsell explain these rules, and the reasons of them, in his own 
words, and then let us hear what he has to say in addition : — 

" We see from the foregoing instances, particularly from the precedents which are 
cited, and read on the 10th of April, 1733, that very soon after the Revolution, the 
House found it necessary to establish a rule, "that they would not receive any petition 
against a bill, then depending, for imposing a tax or duty." The principle upon which 
this rule was adopted appears to be this, — that a tax generally extending in its effect 
over every part of tlie kingdom, and more or less affecting every individual, and in its 
nature necessarily and intentionally imposing a burden upon the people, it can answer 
34* 



402 THE RIGHT OF PETITION. 

no end or purpose ■whatever for any set of petitioners to state these consequences as a 
grievance to the House. The House of Commons, before they come to a resolution 
which imposes a tax, cannot but l^now that it may very sensibly affect the commerce 
or manufacture upon which the duty is laid ; but they cannot permit the inconvenience 
that may possibly be brought upon a particular branch of trade to weigh with them, 
when put in the balance with those advantages which are intended to result to the whole, 
and which the public necessities of the State demand from them . Por these reasons 
it has been thought better, and more candid to the persons petitioning, at once to refuse 
receiving their petition, rather than by receiving it to give countenance to the applica- 
tion, and to mislead the petitioners into an idea, that in consequence of their petition 
the House of Commons would desist from the tax proposed, and impose another, which, 
though it might be less felt by that branch of trade, might be more oppressive to some 
other branch. 

" Upon an accurate examination of the numerous precedents cited on the 10th of 
April, 17.'3.3, (in favor of the doctrine which was then laid down by Mr. Sandys, and 
those who supported the petition of the city of London) out of seventy-nine cases 
which were then produced and read, it will be found there are but three which apply 
to this question. The first of these is the petition against a bill for imposing a duty of 
ten per cent, ad valorem upon the woolen manufacture in the year 1696 -'7. The reso- 
lution of the Committee of "Ways and Means upon this point brought such a cloud of 
petitions from all parts of the kingdom — not only from those who were immediately 
concerned in the woolen trade, but from others who thought they might be ultimately 
affected by it — that it was thought advisable not even to present the bill. And in the 
very next session, in April and June, 1698, the House, having felt the inconveniency 
resulting from admitting these petitions, peremptorily refused to receive the petitions 
which were then offered against the taxes at that time depending." 

In the following note to this passage, the rule is still further 
explained : — 

'■ What Mr. "Winnington afterwards said in the debate upon the petition against the 
bill relating to the trade of the sugar colonies, proved true upon this occasion. ' If we 
were to receive all petitions against bills that are brought in for the laying on of any 
new duties, there would be sucli multitudes of them against every such bill, that the 
nation might be undone for want of an immediate supply for the public use, whilst we 
are sitting to hear frivolous petitions against bills brought in for granting that supply.' 
Commons Debates, vol. vii. p. 310. This reasoning does not apply to the receiving 
petitions which desire the repeal or alteration of taxes imposed in any former session ; 
no public service is delayed by receiving and considering such petitions ; nor can the 
time of the House be employed more properly than in endeavoring to lighten the bur- 
dens which have been necessarily imposed upon the people, by introducing such regu- 
lations, in the manner of collecting the taxes, as experience shall point out ; or even 
! by repealing taxes, in instances where no regulation can make them fit to be continued." 

/' 

/ And now let us hear Mr. Hatsell's account of the second of 

these rules : — 

" The great number of petitions that were presented to the House of Commons, at 
the commencement of the session which began in October, 1705, from persons either 



THE RIGHT OF PETITION. 403 

claiming an arrear of pay as officers, or making some other demand npon the public, 
made it necessary for the House to put some restriction upon these applications ; which, 
their being often promoted by members who were friends to the parties, and carrying 
with them the appearance of justice or of charity, induxjcd the rest of the House to 
wish well to, or at most to be indifferent to their success ; and by this means large sums 
were granted to private persons, improvidently, and sometimes without sufficient 
grounds. Very early, therefore, in the next session, on the 11th of December, 1706, 
before any petitions of this sort could be again offered, the House came to a resolutioa 
'that they would receive no petition for any sum of money relating to public service, 
but what is recommended from the Crown.' This resolution not being at that time made 
a standing order, had no effect beyond the session in which it was passed, so that soon 
after the same practice returned again; and (the same mischiefs resulting from it) the 
House, upon the 11th of June, 1713, ordered the resolution of the 11th of December 
to be read, and declared it to be a standing order of the House. From this time, 
whenever any petition which desires relief by public money is offered, or any motion 
is made to this purpose, before the Speaker puts the question for bringing up the peti- 
tion, it has been the practice, in conformity to this order, that the recommendation of 
the Crown should be signified by some member authorized so to do ; and if the Chan- 
cellor of the Exchequer, or person usually authorized by the Crown, declines to signify 
this recommendation, the House cannot properly receive the petition. It has some- 
times happened that the Chancellor of the Exchequer has, from motives of humanity, 
and in order not to preclude the House from taking a petition under their consideration, 
given the recommendation of the Crown, in cases of which, even at the time, he ac- 
knowledged his disapprobation. This conduct, from whatever motives it may proceed, 
is not to be approved of. It destroys the meaning and spirit of the order, and reduces 
it to a mere form. The resolution of the 11th of December has no other intention 
than to transfer the responsibility of receiving or refusing the petition from the House 
to the Ministers of the Crown. Unless, therefore, the Ministers will do their dutv, by 
examining into the nature of the claim, and the propriety of granting any relief; and 
if they find the application unfounded, will have the courage to inform the House of 
the result of their opinion — it would be better that the standing order should be 
repealed, and the House should be left to act in these, as in other circumstances, with- 
out restraint or control." 

It will be perceived, Sir, from these passages, that neither of 
these rules of the British Parliament go the length of the rule 
of this House. Neither of them provides that petitions of a 
certain class shall not be received at any time, or under any 
circumstances, or be entertained in any way whatever. The 
first declares only that petitions against a tax bill shall not be 
received while that bill is actually pending;* and this, on the 
ground that the nation might be undone for want of an imme- 
diate supply for the public service, while Parliament was occu- 
pied in hearing petitions against some particular mode of raising 

* This rule has been discontinued by the House of Commons within a few years 
past. 



404 THE RIGHT OF PETITION. 

that supply. And it is expressly admitted that petitions for the 
repeal or alteration of these same taxes may subsequently be 
received. The second of these rules stops equally short of an 
entire exclusion of a certain class of petitions. Its whole inten- 
tion and operation is to throw upon the ministry the responsi- 
bility of all appropriations of public money. It substantially 
refers all the petitions to which it relates to the advisers of the 
Crown, (themselves members of Parliament,) and makes them 
a committee to receive and consider them. And it expressly 
provides that, with their indorsement, these very petitions shall 
be received and considered by the House. What sort of analogy 
is there between rules like these and a rule which declares that 
petitions on certain enumerated topics shall not be received at 
any time, or under any circumstances, or be entertained in any 
way whatever ? 

But what does Mr. Hatsell say further on the subject of these 
rules? " The House," he says, in commenting on one of them, 
" ought to be particularly cautious not to be over rigid in extend- 
ing this rule beyond what the practice of their ancestors in 
former times can justify them in. To receive, and hear, and 
consider the petitions of their fellow-subjects, when presented 
decently, and containing no matter intentionally offensive to the 
House, is a duty incumbent upon them, antecedent to all rules 
and orders that may have been instituted for their own conven- 
ience. Justice and the laws of their country demand it from them." 
Here, Mr. Speaker, is laid down, in the clearest and noblest 
phraseology, — in words which, after the principles that have so 
often been advanced, and the practice which has so long pre- 
vailed here, ought to be emblazoned in letters of gold upon every 
column in this hall, and to be suspended on a scroll of silver from 
the very beak of the eagle above your head, — the true parlia- 
mentary and constitutional doctrine on the subject of petitions. 
But, before enlarging upon this idea, I must say a few words 
in defence of the fourth proposition which I promised to prove, 
namely, — that there is abundant reason for believing that the 
framers of our Constitution would have been the last persons to 
acquiesce in the exceptions to this doctrine which are contained 
in the two special rules which have just been cited. Why, Sir, 



THE RIGHT OF PETITION. 405 

is it forgotten that our fathers had some experience of their own 
on this subject of the reception of petitions ? Is it forgotten that 
the Declaration of Independence itself, after reciting the various 
oppressions to which the American Colonies had been subjected, 
goes on to state, that " in every stage of these oppressions, we 
have petitioned for redress in the most humble terms ; our re- 
peated petitions have been answered by repeated injury?" Is 
it forgotten that Patrick Henry, of Virginia, in that celebrated 
speech, which is at the tongue's end of every schoolboy in the 
Union, and in which he comes to the stern and startling conclu- 
sion, " we must fight," presents it as the very climax of his 
description of the unbearable grievances of that day, " we have 
petitioned, we have remonstrated, we have supplicated : our 
petitions have been slighted, our remonstrances disregarded, and 
we have been spurned with contempt from the foot of the throne ? " 
It is an historical fact that the petitions of our fathers were refused 
a reception in the British Parliament. And on what ground 
were they refused? Upon what principle were they denied a 
hearing, or any entertainment whatever ? Sir, it was in con- 
formity with these very precedents which have been cited here 
so triumphantly ! It was under these very rules which are 
appealed to so confidently in justification of our rule I Here is 
the record of the fact : — 

"On the loth of February, 1765, a petition of l\Ir. Montague, agent for Virginia, 
and a petition from Connecticut, and another from the inhabitants of Carolina, against 
the bill then depending, for imposing a stamp duty in America, being offered, upon the 
question for bringing them up, it passed in the negative." 

And now will any gentleman undertake to maintain that the 
framers of the Constitution intended to give their assent to 
principles, under which their own petitions against the Stamp 
Act were refused a reception ? Will any gentleman rely on these 
precedents, while the words of Patrick Henry and the language 
of the Declaration are still fresh in his memory ? No, Sir, I am 
sure I need not urge this point further. 

Let me recur, then, for a moment, to the admirable exposition 
of Mr. Hatsell: "To receive, and hear, and consider the peti- 
tions of their fellow-subjects, when presented decently, and 
containing no matter intentionally offensive to the House, is a 



406 THE RIGHT OF PETITION. 

duty incumbent upon them, antecedent to all rules and orders 
that may have been instituted for their own convenience. Justice 
and the laws of our country demand it of them." This sen- 
tence, I repeat, contains, in the noblest terms, the true consti- 
tutional and parliamentary principle. It embraces the whole 
rule and the only rule ; the whole exception and the only excep- 
tion to the rule; — the rule being that petitions shall be received, 
heard, and considered ; and the exception relating exclusively to 
such as are not decently presented, or such as contain matter 
intentionally offensive to the House. 

[Mr. Winthrop was here interrupted by the expiration of the 
morning hour, and the subject was laid over until the following 
day.] 

January 24, 1844. 

The orders of the day having been called for by Mr. Adams, Mr. Winthrop pro- 
ceeded with his remarks : 

When I was interrupted yesterday, I was proceeding to make 
some comments on the golden rule which has been laid down 
on the subject of petitions by Mr. Hatsell, who, by all acknow- 
ledgment, is the highest authority on the subject of parliamentary 
principles and parliamentary precedents ; and who has been styled 
by Mr. Jefferson "the preeminent authority" on all such matters. 
It will be observed that this rule contains no sanction for the 
doctrine which has so often been advanced here, that petitions 
are not to be received, because there may seem to be no author- 
ity to grant the prayer of them. And where, let me ask, where 
would such a doctrine lead us in these days and in this country? 
Where would it lead us in this House, and at this very moment? 
Why, sir, there is an undoubted majority of this body, who hold 
that Congress have no constitutional authority to establish a 
national bank ; no constitutional authority to carry on a system 
of internal improvements ; no constitutional authority to distri- 
bute among the States the proceeds of the public lands. I am 
by no means sure that there is a majority here who would dare 
to assert, in positive terms, the power of Congress to protect 
American labor. We all know that, in the changes of parties 
and of party opinions in this country, this Constitution of ours 
is one thing to-day and another thing to-morrow; a strait- 



THE RIGHT OF PETITION. 407 

jacket — as an honorable member from Virginia has termed it — 
to one set of men, and a charter wide withal as the' wind to 
another set of men. Some of ns maintain that the power of 
Congress over slavery in the District of Columbia is as clear 
and as unqualified as its power to regulate commerce or to sup- 
port a navy. Others hold, on the contrary, that an exclusive 
jurisdiction in all cases whatsoever does not extend to the case 
of slavery. In the mean time, some are of opinion that there is 
a power in this Government to annex Texas to the Union ; w^iile 
others, (and myself among the number,) maintain, that such an 
annexation would be a plain and palpable violation of the Con- 
stitution, and an utter annihilation of what little there is left, on 
our side at least, of the old, original compromises, on which that 
Constitution was adopted. Where, I repeat, would the doctrine 
end, that petitions are not to be received, if they ask for any 
thing which an existing majority here may deem it unconstitu- 
tional to grant ? It is plain that the power to grant the prayer 
of a petition is a question to be considered, and the petition 
must be received and heard in order that this question may be 
considered. It is always, let me add, in the power of Congress 
to propose amendments to the Constitution. Perhaps the con- 
sideration of a petition may lead to such propositions. Perhaps 
this may be the very design and object of the petitioners. This 
idea alone is an ample answer to the suggestion, that a supposed 
or even a real want of power to grant them, is ground enough 
for a summary refusal to receive petitions. 

But this golden rule of Mr. Hatsell's, it will be perceived, does 
not stop short at the reception of petitions. It declares it to be 
a duty incumbent on us, antecedent to all rules and orders for 
our own convenience, to hear and consider them. And, for my- 
self, I do not desire to have the rule of this House changed at 
all, if it be not so changed as to meet and embrace this whole 
principle. As to receiving petitions for the purpose of laying 
them instantly on the table, it is a mere evasion of the principle, 
and a mere mockery of the parties. The original excitement on 
this subject sprung up under such a rule as that would be; and 
a return to it would do nothing, nothing whatever, to allay that 
excitement. In this one point, therefore, I agree with the honor- 



408 THE RIGHT OF PETITION. 

able member from Alabama ; let us have the present rule or 
none. I would only reverse the order of the alternatives, and 
say, let us have no rule, or let this rule stand as it is. 

But, says the gentleman from South Carolina, (Mr. Rhett,) 
where does this duty to consider a petition terminate? How 
much consideration do you claim ? If you demand to have 
your petitions received, and heard, and considered, why not to 
have them referred, why not to have them reported on, why not 
to Ifave them granted ? Now, sir, I readily admit that it is diffi- 
cult to lay down, in advance, the precise line of demarcation 
between the right of petition and the right of legislation ; to say 
exactly where the one ends and the other begins ; or to fix the 
precise measure of consideration which will fulfil the one, with- 
out infringing on the other. But this difficulty does not prevent 
our confounding the plainest and most obvious distinctions. It 
was well said by Mr. Burke, in one of his speeches or essays, 
that " though no man can draw a stroke between the confines 
of night and day, yet darkness and light are, upon the whole, 
tolerably distinguishable." So, here, though it may puzzle us 
to put down in black and white the exact boundary line between 
the right of the petitioner and the right of the legislator, yet the 
consideration of a prayer, and the granting of a prayer, are, 
" upon the whole, tolerably distinguishable." Indeed, there is 
no degree, no gradation, no middle term, between the two ideas. 
But why, why all this metaphysical subtlety as to a certain class 
of petitions ? You do not refuse to receive other petitions, lest 
you should be ensnared into some unavoidable obligation to 
grant them. Heaven knows that there are adverse reports enough 
made and adopted in this House, in reference to petitions which 
we uniformly receive and consider. Petitions for pensions; peti- 
tions for the allowance of the most just claims ; petitions for the 
payment of the most undeniable debts ; why. Sir, we make no 
bones of despatching a hundred of them in a morning, on a 
private bill day. Whence, then, all this anxiety and alarm, lest 
the reception of the petitions enumerated in the rule under de- 
bate should precipitate us upon some irresistible necessity to 
grant their prayer? 

Mr. Speaker, we ask for these petitions only that you will 



THE RIGHT OF PETITION. 409 

treat them as you treat other petitions. We set up for them no 
absurd or extravagant pretensions. We claim for them no exclu- 
sive or engrossing attention. We desire only that you will 
adopt no proscriptive and passionate course in regard to them. 
We demand only that you will allow them to go through the 
same orderly round of reception, reference, and report, with ail 
other petitions. When they have gone through that round, they 
will be just as much under your own control as they were be- 
fore they entered on it. 

I heartily hope, Sir, that this course is now about to be adopt- 
ed. I hope it as an advocate of the right of petition. I hope it 
as a Northern man with Northern principles, if you please to 
term me so. But I hope it not less as an American citizen with 
American principles ; as a friend to the Constitution and the 
Union ; as one who is as little disposed to interfere with any 
rights of other States, as to surrender any rights of his own 
State ; as one who, though he may see provisions of the Con- 
stitution which are odious in principle and unjust in practice — 
provisions which he would gladly have had omitted at the out- 
set, and gladly see altered now, if such an alteration were prac- 
ticable, — is yet willing to stand by our Constitution as it is, 
our Union as it is, our Territory as it is ! I do honestly believe 
that the course of this House in relation to these petitions has 
done more than all other causes combined to bring the Consti- 
tution into disregard and the Union into danger. Other causes 
have indeed cooperated with this cause. Your arbitrary and 
oppressive State laws for imprisoning our free colored seamen 
in the Southern ports; your abhorrent proposals to annex Texas 
to the Union, in violation of the compromises of the Constitu- 
tion ; yes. Sir, of those very compromises on which Adams and 
Hancock met Jefierson and Madison, (to use language which 
was employed in casting reproach upon the resolutions of Massa- 
chusetts which were recently presented here ;) these laws and 
these proposals have unquestionably cooperated of late with the 
denial of the right of petition, in exciting in some quarters a 
spirit of discontent with our existing system. But this rule of 
the House has been the original spring of the whole feeling. 
And to what advantage on the part of those by whom it was 
35 



410 THE RIGHT OF PETITION. 

devised ? Have Southern institutions been any safer since its 
establishment? Have the enemies to those institutions been 
rendered any less ardent or less active by it? Has agitation on 
the subject of slavery in this Hall been repressed or allayed by 
it? Have these petitions and resolutions been diminished in 
number under its operation and influence? No, Sir, the very 
reverse, the precise opposite of all this, has been the result. The 
attempt of this House to suppress and silence all utterance on 
the subject of slavery in this Hall, has terminated as did the 
attempt of one of the Kings of ancient Judah to suppress the 
warnings of the prophet of God. The prophet, we are told, 
took another roll, and wrote on it all the words which the King 
had burned in the fire, and " there were added besides unto 
them many like words I " And this always has been, and always 
will be, the brief history of every effort to silence free inquiry 
and stifle free discussion. I thank Heaven that it is so. It is 
this inherent and inextinguishable elasticity of opinion, of con- 
science, of inquiry, which, like the great agent of modern art, 
gains only new force, fresh vigor, redoubled powers of progress 
and propulsion, by every degree of compression and restraint — ■ 
it is this, to which the world owes all the liberty it has yet 
acquired, and to which it will owe all that is yet in store for it. 
"Well did John Milton exclaim, in his noble defence of unli- 
censed printing, " Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to 
argue freely, above all liberties;" for, in securing that, we secure 
the all-sufficient instrument for achieving all other liberties. 



NOTE. 



^iiE proceedings of the House of Commons in the case of Skinner and the 
East India Company, as they stood u^ion the Journals before they were ex- 
punged by the order of the King, are Inserted, as follows, in the appendix to 
the third volume of Ilatsell's Precedents, (London edition, 1818.) 

Die Sabhati, 4° Decemhris, 1G69. 

The House then, according to former order, resumed the debate of the matter 
concerning trials and privileges In Parliament. 

The House of Commons being informed that Sir Samuel Bernardlston, a 
commoner of England, has been called before the House of Lords, and hath 
had a judgment passed upon him, and a fine imposed, and a record made thereof 
in the Exchequer, mentioning the fine to be paid : 

Resolved, &c., That a conference be desired of the Lords upon the matter 
aforesaid, and other proceedings relating thereunto ; and, also, upon the pro- 
ceedings concerning Thomas Skinner and the East India Company. 

Resolved, &e.. That a Committee be appointed to prepare and draw up rea- 
sons, to be Insisted upon at the conference to be had with the Lords touching 
the matter aforesaid, namely: Mr. Solicitor-General, Mr. Sergeant Maynard, 
&c. ; and the special care of this matter Is recommended to IVIr. Solicitor-Gene- 
ral, Sir Robert Howard, and Sir Thomas Lee. 

Die Martis, 7° Decemhris, 1GC9. 

Ordered, That the report of Sir Robert Howard, from the committee ap- 
pointed to prepare reasons to be used at the conference with the Lords, be heard 
this day, next after the report from the Committee of Elections. 

Sir Robert Howard reports from the committee appointed to prepare and 
bring In reasons to be Insisted upon at the conference to be had with the Lords, 
In the matter relating to the East India Company and Skinner and Sir Samuel 
Bernardlston, that the committee had met according to the commands of the 
House, and had taken deliberate consideration of the whole matter ; but found 
they were disabled to prepare reasons without a groundwork of some particular 
heads agreed by the House, to the justification whereof the reasons might be 
applied ; and that the committee had prepared some heads, drawn up Into five 



412 NOTE. 

several resolves, Avliioh he read in his place, and tendered to the House for their 
approbation : and the same being again read, are as foUoweth, namely : 

1. That it is an inherent right of every commoner of England, to prepare 
and present petitions to the House of Commons, in case of grievance, and the 
House of Commons to receive the same. 

2. That it is the undoubted right and privilege of the House of Commons to 
judge and determine, touching the nature and matter of such petitions, how far 
they are fit or unfit to be received. 

3. That no court whatsoever hath power to judge or censure any petition pre- 
pared for or presented to the House of Commons, and received by them, unless 
transmitted from thence, or the matter complained of by theiH. 

4. Whereas a petition by the Govei-nor and Company of Merchants trading 
to East India was presented to the House of Commons by Sir Samuel Bernard- 
iston and others, complaining of grievances therein ; which the Lords have cen- 
sured under the notion of a scandalous paper or libel ; that the said censure and 
proceedings of the Lords against the said Sir Samuel Bernardiston are contrary 
to, and in subversion of the rights and privileges of the House of Commons, and 
liberties of the Commons of England. 

5. That the continuance upon record of the judgment given by the Lords, 
and complained of by the House of Commons, in the last session of this Parlia- 
ment, in the case of Thomas Skinner and the East India Company, is prejudi- 
cial to the rights of the Commoners of England. 

Ordered, That the report delivered in by Sir Kobert Howard be taken into 
consideration, the first business to-morrow morning. 

Die Mercurii, 8° Decemhris, 1CG9. 

The House then resumed the consideration of the report of Sir Robert How- 
ard, of the heads and proposals brought in from the Committee appointed to 
draw up reasons to be insisted on at the conference to be had with the Lords in 
the matter concerning the East India Company and Skinner and Sir Samuel 
Bernardiston. 

The first head was twice read, and, with the addition of the word " of," upon 
the question, agreed to. 

The second head was read twice ; and, with the alteration of the word " re- 
tain " for " receive," upon the question, agreed. 

The third proposition was twice read, and some amendments made thereto. 

The question being put, to agi'ee to this proposition — 

The House divided. 

The noes went out. 

Tellers : 

Mr. Morice, ) ,-, .i „ i ao 

' - lor the yeas, 109. 

Mr. Steward, ) 

Sir J. Talbot, ]. For the noes, 73. 

Colonel Keames, ) 

And so it was resolved in the afiirmative. 



NOTE. 413 

The fourth proposition was twice read ; and the words " under the notion of" 
omitted, and the word " as " inserted in the stead of it ; and the proposition thus 
amended, upon the question, agreed. 

The fifth proposition Avas read twice, and, upon the question, agreed, 

1. That it is an inherent right of every Commoner of England, to prepare 
and present petitions to the House of Commons, in case of grievance, and of the 
House of Commons to receive the same. 

2. That it is the undoubted right and privilege of the House of Commons to 
judge and determine, touching the nature and matter of such petitions, how far 
they are fit or unfit to be retained. 

3. That no court whatsoever hath power to judge or censure any petition pre- 
pared for, or presented to and received by, the House of Commons, unless 
transmitted from thence, or the matter is complained of by them. 

4. That whereas a petition, by the Governor and Company of Merchants 
trading to the East Indies, Avas presented to the House of Commons by Sir 
Samuel Bernardiston and others, complaining of grievance therein, which the 
Lords have censured as a scandalous paper or libel ; the said censure and pro- 
ceedings of the Lords against the said Sir Samuel Bernardiston ai'C contrary to, 
and in subversion of, the rights and privileges of the House of Commons, and 
liberties of the Commons of England. 

5. That the continuance upon record of the judgment given by the Lords, 
and complained of by the House of Commons, in the last session of this Parlia- 
ment, in the case of Thomas Skinner and the East India Company, is prejudi- 
cial to the rights of the Commons of England. 

Resolved, That the committee formally appointed to draw up reasons to be 
used at the conference with the Lords, be revived, and do sit this afternoon, and 
prepare reasons and arguments to justify the propositions agreed to, and prepare 
and propose what is fit to be offered or desired of the Lords ; and that these 
members following be added to said committee, namely: Sir Walter Gouge, 
Mr. Seymour, &c. 

Die Veneris, 10° Decembris, 1CG9. 

Sir Robert Howard reports from the Committee to which it was referred, to 
prejjare and draw up reasons to be used at the conference with the Lords, in 
the matter of the East India Company and Skinner and Sir Samuel Bernardis- 
ton, to justify the resolves of this House ; and also two propositions thereupon to 
be made to the Lords, which he read, and after delivered the same in at the 
Clerk's table ; and the same being twice read, and with some amendment, upon 
the question, agreed, are as followeth : 

To the first, second, and third, depending on one another : 
1. It hath been always, time out of mind, the constant and uncontroverted 
usage and custom of the House of Commons to have petitions presented to them 
from Commoners, in case of grievance, public or private : in evidence whereof, 
it is one of the first works that is done by the House of Commons to appoint a 
Grand Committee to receive petitions and informations of grievances. 

35* 



414 NOTE. 

2. That in no age that we can find, ever any person, who presented any 
grievance, by way of petition, to the House of Commons, which was received 
by them, was ever censured by the Lords without complaint of the Commons. 

3. That no suitors for justice, in any inferior court whatsoever, in law or 
equity, exhibiting their complaint for anj matters proper to be proceeded upon 
in that court, are therefore punishable criniinalh", tliough imtrue, or suable by 
way of action in any other court wheresoever ; but are only subject to a modei'- 
ate fine or amercement by that court ; unless in some cases specially provided 
for by act of Parliament, as appeals, or the like. 

4. In case men should be punishable in other courts for preparing and pre- 
senting petitions for redi-ess of grievances to the House of Commons, it may 
discourage and deter His Majesty's subjects from seeking redress of their griev- 
ances, and by that means frustrate the main and principal end for which Parlia- 
ments were ordained. 

To the fourth proposition : 

1. That no petition, nor any other matter depending in the House of Com- 
mons, can be taken notice of by the Lords without breach of privilege, unless 
communicated by the House of Commons. 

2. L^pon conclusion of the four first jjropositions, it is further to be alleged 
that the House of Peers (as well as all other courts) are, in all their judicial 
proceedings, to be guided and limited by law ; but if they should give a wrong 
sentence, contrary to law, and the party grieved might not seek redress thereof 
in full Parliament, and to that end repair to the House of Commons, who are 
part of the legislative power, that either they may interpose with their Lord- 
ships for the reversal of such sentence, or prepare a bill for that jiurpose, and 
for the preventing the like grievance for the time to come — the consequence 
thereof would plainly be, both that their Lordship's judicature would be bound- 
less, and above law, and that the party grieved should be without remedy. 

As to the fifth proposition : The Committee refer to the former reasons 
offered against the judgment of the Lords against the East India Company, in 
the last session of Parliament. 



THE OEEGON QUESTION 



AXD 



THE TREATY OF WASHINGTON 



X SPEECH DELIVERED IN THE HOtTSE OF REPRESENTATIVES OF THE UNI- 
TED STATES, IN COMMITTEE OF THE WHOLE ON THE STATE OF THE 
UNION, MARCH 18, 1S44. 



I HAVE no purpose, Mr. Chairman, of attempting a detailed 
reply to the honorable gentleman who has just taken his seat. 
I was greatly in hopes that another member of this House, and 
I will add, another member of the Massachusetts delegation, 
who has so often instructed and delighted us on these questions 
of foreign controversy, (Mr. J. Q. Adams,) would have taken the 
floor for this purpose. I would gladly yield it to him, or, indeed, 
to any one else who is disposed for it, feeling, as I deeply do, 
the want of greatel: preparation and longer reflection for doing 
justice to the occasion. I am unwilling, however, that the speech 
which has just been delivered should pass off" without some 
notice. I fear, too, that if I yield to the kind suggestion of a 
friend near me, and ask a postponement of the debate, I may 
lose an opportunity altogether. Recent proceedings in this House 
afford me very little encouragement to try such an experiment. 
On more than one occasion, questions of the highest interest 
and importance seem to have been brought up unexpectedly, as 
this has been, for the purpose of allowing some member of the 
majority of the House to deliver an elaborate exposition of his 
views, and then to have been shuffled off again by the previous 
question, or by a motion to lay on the table, before any member 



416 THE OREGON QUESTION AND THE TREATY OF WASHINGTON. 

of the minority could open his lips in reply. I proceed, therefore, 
to make the best of the opportunity which is now secured to me. 
And, in the first place, let me say a word in regard to the 
sectional character which has been given to this subject. It has 
been often said that the question about Oregon is a Western 
question, and a disposition has been manifested to charge hostil- 
ity to Western interests and Western rights upon all who are 
not ready to draw the sword, without further delay, in defence 
of this Territory. I deny this position altogether. It is a 
national question. It is a question for the whole country. The 
North have as much interest in it as the West, and as much 
right to be heard upon it; indeed, there are some views in which 
it is more a Northern than a Western question. I cannot forget 
that the American claim to Oregon, so far as it rests upon dis- 
covery, dates back to Massachusetts adventure and Boston 
enterprise. It was a Boston ship which gave its name to the 
Columbia River. It was Captain Robert Gray, of Boston, 
who first discovered that river. It was the Hancock and the 
Adams of Massachusetts — the proscribed patriots of the Revo- 
lution — whose names were inscribed on those remote capes. 
And if we turn from the early history of Oregon to its present 
importance, and to the immediate interests which are involved 
in its possession, the North will be found no less prominently 
concerned in the question. The great present value of this 
Territory has relation to the commerce and navigation of the 
Pacific Ocean. The whale fishery of this cotmtry requires safe 
stations and harbors on the northwest coast. And by what part 
of the nation is this fishery carried on ? Why, Sir, the State of 
Massachusetts owns nine tenths of all the whale ships of the 
United States. The single town of New Bedford, — the residence 
of my honorable friend, Mr. Grinnell, — sends out 92,000, out of 
a little more than 130,000 tons of the American shipping em- 
ployed in this business ; and three other towns in the same 
district employ 31,170 tons of the remainder. So far, then, as 
the whaling interest is to be regarded, the Oregon question is 
emphatically a Massachusetts question. I feel bound to add, 
however, that the whole coast of Oregon can hardly furnish one 
really good harbor. South of the forty-ninth degree of latitude, — 



THE OREGON QUESTION AND THE TREATY OF AVASIIINGTON. 417 

a boundary which we have once ofFered to compromise upon, — 
there is not one which a ship can get safely into, or safely out of, 
during three quarters of the year. The harbor of San Francisco, 
in Northern California, would be worth the whole Territory of 
Oregon to the whaling fleet of the nation. 

A mere Western interest I Sir, I doubt whether the West 
has a particle of real interest in the possession of Oregon. It 
may have an interest, a momentary, seeming, delusive interest 
in a war for Oregon. Doubtless, the Western States might reap 
a rich harvest of spoils in the prosecution of such a war. Doubt- 
less, there would be fat contracts of all sorts growing out of such 
a contest, which would enure to their peculiar advantage. Doubt- 
less, the characteristic spirit of the western people — that spirit 
of restless adventure, and roving enterprise, and daring conflict, 
which the honorable gentleman has just eulogized — would find 
ample room and verge enough for its indulgence, even to satiety, 
in such a campaign. Whether that spirit, indomitable as it is 
in any ordinary encounter, would not be found stumbling upon 
the dark mountains, or fainting in the dreary valleys, or quenched 
beneath the perpetual snows which Nature has opposed to the 
passage to this disputed territory, remains to be seen. A march 
to Oregon, I am inclined to believe, would take the courage out 
of not a few who now believe themselves incapable of fatigue 
or fear. But suppose the war were over, successfully over, and 
Oregon ours, what interest, let me ask, what real, substantial, 
permanent interest would the West have in its possession ? Are 
our western brethren straitened for elbow room, or likely to be so 
for a thousand years ? Have they not too much land for their 
own advantage already ? I verily believe that if land were only 
half as abundant and half as cheap as it is, the prosperity of the 
West would be doubled. As an Eastern representative I would 
never submit a proposition to raise the price of the public lands; 
such a proposition would be misconstrued and perverted. But 
if I w^ere a Western man, I would ask nothing sooner, I would 
desire nothing more earnestly of this Government, than to 
double the price of these lands. It would put money into the 
pocket of every Western farmer, and into the coffers of every 
Western State. Sale for the purpose of settlement would not 



418 THE OREGON QUESTION AND THE TREATY OF WASHINGTON. 

be checked ; speculation only would be restrained. The average 
income of the nation would be as great as now ; the ultimate 
receipts far greater; and all parties would be benefited in the 
end. The West has no interest, the country has no interest, in 
extending our territorial possessions. This Union of ours mvist 
have limits ; and it was well said by Mr. Senator Benton, in 
1825, that westward, " the ridge of the Rocky Mountains may 
be named, without offence, as presenting a convenient, natural, 
and everlasting boundary. Along the back of this ridge the 
western limit of this Republic should be drawn, and the statue 
of the fabled God, Terminus, should be raised upon its highest 
peak, never to be thrown down." 

The Oregon question, however, Mr. Chairman, as now pre- 
sented to us, is not a question of interest, but of right; not a 
question as to the ultimate reach of our federal Union, but as to 
the existing extent of our territorial title. Upon this point I 
shall say little. An argument to this House in favor of our title 
to Oregon would be words thrown away. If any man can 
convince the British Government that the Territory is ours, his 
labor will be well employed, and the sooner he sets about it the 
better. But we are convinced already. For myself, certainly, I 
believe that we have a good title to the whole twelve degrees of 
latitude. I believe it, not merely because it is the part of patriot- 
ism to believe one's own country in the right, but because I am 
unable to resist the conclusions to that effect, to which an exa- 
mination of the evidence and the authorities have brought me. 
In saying this, however, I would by no means be understood to 
concur in the idea which has been recently advanced in some 
quarters, that our title is of such a character that we are author- 
ized to decline all negotiation on the subject. Why, Sir, with 
what face can we take such a stand, with the history of this 
question before us and before the world ? Nothing to negotiate 
about! Has not every administration of our government, since 
we had a government to be administered, treated this as an open 
question? Have we not at one time expressly offered to aban- 
don all pretension to five twelfths of the Territory, and to allow 
our boundary line to follow the forty-ninth degree of latitude? 
Have we not united in a convention of joint occupancy for thirty 



THE OREGON QUESTION AND THE TREATY OF WASHINGTON. 419 

years, in order to keep it an open question ? What pretence 
have we for planting ourselves on our presumed rights at this 
late day, and for shutting our ears to all overtures of negotiation, 
and all assertion or argument of the rights of others? None; 
none whatever. Such a course would subject us to the just 
reproach and scorn of the civilized world. 

But the question before the committee relates simply to the 
termination of the convention of joint occupancy. This con- 
vention originated in the year 1818, and was limited to the term of 
ten years. In 1827, it was extended indefinitely, subject, however, 
to the right of either party to annul and abrogate the same, on giv- 
ing twelve months' notice to the other party. And now the ques- 
tion is not whether this joint occupation of Oregon shall be con- 
tinued forever. Nobody imagines that the United States and Great 
Britain are about to hold this Territory in common much longer. 
Neither country desires it ; neither country would consent to it. 
The simple question is, whether the United States shall take the 
responsibility of giving the noti.ce to-day ; whether, after having 
agreed to this joint occupancy for nearly thirty years, we shall 
take occasion of this precise moment in the history of the two 
countries to insist on bringing it to a close ? I am opposed, 
wholly opposed, to such a course. I agree with the report of 
the Committee on Foreign Affairs, (a committee, be it remem- 
bered, composed of six members of the Van Buren party, and 
of three only of the friends of Mr. Clay,) that it is entirely inex- 
pedient to act at all on the subject at this time ; and I sincerely 
wish that the chairman of that committee (Mr. C. J. Ingersoll) 
had saved me the trouble of advocating his own report, and had 
given us an argument in favor of its adoption, instead of making 
the any thing but reasonable or pacific speech, which he has 
just concluded. 

Sir, I regard the proposition to give the required notice to the 
British Government at this precise moment, as eminently ill- 
timed, both in regard to our relations with Great Britain and to 
our own domestic condition. We are just at the close of an 
administration. We are on the eve of another election of Pre- 
sident. How this election may terminate may be a matter of 
doubt in some quarters. I have no doubt. But, however it may 



420 THE OREGON QUESTION AND THE TREATY OF WASHINGTON. 

terminate, it is no more than fair to those who are to be success- 
ful, to leave to them the initiation of a policy, which they are to 
be responsible for carrying on and completing. A twelve months 
notice I Why, to what point of time in our political affairs will 
the expiration of that notice bring us ? To the very first month 
of a new administration ; an administration which will hardly 
have taken the oaths of office ; which will hardly have selected 
. and installed its advisers and agents ; and which (unless you 
are going to compel the calling of another extra session, only to 
deride and denounce it afterwards,) will have no Congress at the 
Capitol to act in any way upon its measures! This termination 
of joint occupation is to be followed by something, I suppose. 
It must be followed, it is intended to be followed, by some act 
of separate occupation. If negotiation, in the mean time, shall 
have failed, as it certainly will fail if this notice be given, some- 
thing else than negotiation, a strife or a struggle of some sort, 
must ensue. It may, or may not, amount to an immediate war 
with England. But whatever form it may assume, it will involve 
responsibility, it will require preparation, it will demand matured 
and vigorous counsels. And how is a new administration, with 
its cabinet, perhaps, not yet arranged, and without a Congress 
to sustain it, to meet such an exigency as it ought to be met? 

Mr. Chairman, it was — I will not say the policy and design 
of the Van Buren administration — but, certainly, the result of 
their course on going out of office three years ago, to precipitate 
their successors, while yet without that matured organization 
which is essential to any effective action, upon a condition of 
foreign affairs of the most delicate and dangerous character. 
Few persons, I imagine, know, and few persons, perhaps, ever 
will know, how critical were the relations of Great Britain and 
the United States at the precise instant of General Harrison's 
accession to the Presidency. My honored and venerable col- 
league (Mr. Adams) seemed to understand them, when he 
charged it openly upon the Van Buren party, a session or two 
ago, that they had fired the ship when they found they could no 
longer hold it! I trust that there is no design, no disposition, no 
willingness, to bring about the same state of things again. It 
ought to be the patriotic aim of us all, that whoever the next 



THE OREGON QUESTION AND THE TREATY OF WASniNGTON. 421 

President may be, he may have a smooth sea and a fair wind to 
start with ; and that he may not be driven upon storms and 
breakers before his hand has fairly grappled upon the helm, and 
before his crew have got on their sea legs ! 

Sir, if there was any thing too pacific, any thing too compro- 
mising, any thing too yielding in the course of President Tyler, 
or his Secretary of State, in conducting the recent negotiations 
with Great Britain — all which I utterly deny — no small share 
of the blame would rest upon the party which threw upon a 
new administration, in the first hour of its existence, so perilous 
a responsibility ; the party which brought the country to the 
very brink of war, and there left it, without preparation of any 
sort, either of money or munitions ; with its navy dismantled, 
its fortifications dilapidated, and its Treasury many millions 
worse than empty ! 

But the honorable gentleman from Pennsylvania has made a 
charge in relation to the treaty of Washington, of a somewhat 
different character. He has told us that the British ministry 
have succeeded in depriving this country of a considerable por- 
tion of our territory on the northeast, with a perfect knowledge 
that they had no right to it. He has told us that the Prime 
Minister of Endand has declared in Parliament that he had 
proof, in the handwriting of a late English monarch, that the 
British claim was without foundation ; and he has alluded to 
what he calls a corresponding acknowledgment of a distin- 
guished member of the House of Lords ! Mr. Chairman, this 
attempt to destroy the confidence of the American Congress 
and of the American people in the good faith and common 
honesty of the British Government, at the very moment when 
we are about to enter upon new and critical negotiations with 
them, can hardly, in my judgment, be too strongly condemned. 
The charge is entirely unwarranted. The speeches of Sir 
Robert Peel and Lord Brougham justify no such impeachment 
of British integrity. What were the circumstances under which 
the remarks were made to which the honorable member had 
reference ? It is well known that a charge of bad faith had 
been brought against our negotiator, Mr. Webster, for having 

36 



422 THE OREGON QUESTION AND THE TREATY OF ■WASHINGTON. 

concealed from Lord Ashburton all knowledge of a map which 
had been discovered by Mr. Sparks in Paris, and which there 
was the strongest reason for believing to be Dr. Franklin's map. 
This map had a broad red line upon it in close conformity to 
the British claim, and was considered as being somewhat of an 
extinguisher of the American view of the question, so far as the 
authority of maps was concerned. Yet it was carefully con- 
cealed from the British government and the British negotiator. 
For this proceeding Mr. Webster was arraigned both at home 
and abroad. Lord Palmerston, who, as Secretary of Foreign 
Affairs for many years, had failed in all attempts to settle the 
boundary question, and who was, perhaps, a little envious of 
the reputation which his successor. Lord Aberdeen, had acquired 
through the negotiations of Lord Ashburton, publicly arraigned 
Mr. Webster in the House of Commons, and made substantially 
the same charge against him, which the Chairman of the Com- 
mittee of Foreign Affairs in this House has now made against 
the ministry of England. And it was in answer to this attack 
upon Mr. Webster, it was in defence of our Secretary of State, 
— not, perhaps, without some view of vindicating themselves 
from the imputation of having been overreached in the negotia- 
tion, — that Sir Robert Peel and Lord Brougham brought for- 
ward the fact to which the honorable gentleman has alluded. 
They stated that the British government as well as the Ameri- 
can government, had concealed maps which made against their 
own claim ; that Lord Palmerston himself had been guilty of 
the same suppression ; that, beside other maps of less signifi- 
cance, which had been kept out of sight by the ministry of Eng- 
land, there was one which could be traced back to the posses- 
sion of George the Third, the monarch in whose time the separa- 
tion of the two countries had taken place, and upon which there 
was a red line in precise conformity wdth the American claim. 
But what was their course of remark upon the subject ? Did 
they, as the gentleman would imply, admit that these maps, on 
either side, would have been considered as conclusive evidence 
of the intention of the treaty of 1783 ? No such thing ; they 
ridiculed such an idea. Sir Robert Peel commenced his remarks 
on this subject by saying, — 



THE OREGOIT QUESTION AND THE TREATY OF WASHINGTON. 423 

'• The noble lord has spoken at great length of a map recently discovered. He seems 
to think that that map, so discovered, affords conclusive evidence of the justice of the 
British claims. Now, Sir, in the first place, let mc observe to the noljle lord, that con- 
temporary maps may be — where the words of the treaty referred to by them are in 
themselves doubtful — they may be evidence of the intentions of those who framed 
them, but the treaty must be executed according to the words contained in it. Even 
if the map were sustained by the parties, it could not contravene the words of the 
treaty." 

And Lord Brougham followed out the same idea in his speech 
in the House of Lords, when he said : 

" But the map does not tally with the description given. Suppose you had an 
account, in writing, that the Thames, as is the fact, forms the bovmdary of the counties 
of Surrey and Middlesex ; and suppose you found a map, or chart, or plan connected 
with that description, on which a red line through Piccadilly was drawn as a boundary 
— I should not take it ; I should go down to the river ; because the red line is only to 
be regarded if the words do not speak for themselves, or the language is ambiguous. 
And the same is the case here, more or less." 

Now, Mr. Chairman, it is only after these explicit denials of 
the idea, that maps, under whatever circumstances they may 
have been found, are to be taken as conclusive evidence as to 
the justice of claims resting on the descriptions of a treaty, that 
Lord Brougham and Sir Robert Peel proceed to disclose the 
fact of the discovery of the map of George the Third ; and that, 
only in the way of set-off to the map which is supposed to have 
belonged to Dr. Franklin. They do, indeed, speak somewhat 
largely and roundly as to the effect which the production of this 
map of George the Third might have had on the settlement of 
the boundary question, in case maps were to be taken as con- 
clusive evidence. But having expressly denied that they were 
to be so taken, — having rejected and ridiculed the idea of the 
red lines of a map being allowed to control the black letters of 
a treaty description, — their language, however round, admits of 
no such construction as has been given to it by the honorable 
gentleman who has just taken his seat. 

Sir, there is no evidence whatever, in my judgment, of bad 
faith on the part of the British government in these speeches of 
the Prime Minister and Lord Brougham. I do not profess to 
be deeply versed in the science of political morals or interna- 
tional obligation ; but I should say that the principles of com- 



424 TEE OREGON QUESTION AND THE TREATY OP WASHINGTON. 

mon honesty and common sense would lead to this conclusion. 
If a government, after having set up a claim of any sort, should 
find in its own possession conclusive evidence, evidence conclu- 
sive upon its own conscience, that the claim was unfounded, it 
would be bound, in all honor and in all justice, to disclose the evi- 
dence and abandon the claim. But if the evidence fall short of de- 
monstration, — if reasonable and conscientious doubts still rest 
upon the question, — if there be ground enough left for maintain- 
incr the claim at all, — it would be the height of absurdity in such 
a government, and a piece of most gratuitous generosity to their 
opponent, to make such a disclosure. "Why, Sir, the circum- 
stances of the case we are considering furnish the best possible 
illustration that the position I have taken is the only sound or 
safe one. Here were maps in the secret possession of each 
government at the same moment, which were believed by each 
respectively to present formidable testimony against its own claim, 
and the production of either of which, singly, might have seriously 
affected the final settlement of the disputed boundary. Now, 
suppose Mr. Webster had disclosed to Lord Ashburton the map 
which was then believed to have belonged to Dr. Franklin, and 
the consequence had been a much larger relinquishment of terri- 
tory, on our part, than has actually taken place: — Or, suppose 
Sir Robert Peel had sent over to Mr. Webster the map of 
George the Third, and had consented, upon the strength of it, 
to a line less favorable to his own country. What would the 
government which obtained the advantage under such circum- 
stances have thought of the diplomacy and statesmanship of 
its antagonist ? And even if both governments had shown 
their hands, and exhibited their maps simultaneously, what 
would have been produced but a mutual laugh at each other, 
and a laugh of all the world at both I And the laugh, certainly, 
would not have been diminished, if it had afterwards proved that 
the recently discovered map of Mr. Jay, the only map which we 
now know certainly to have been in the possession of the nego- 
tiators of 1783, was materially diflerent from both the other two. 
Well, Sir, did Mr. Webster say for himself, on this subject, that 
"he confessed he did not think it a very urgent duty, on his part, 
to go to Lord Ashburton and tell him that he had found a bit of 



THE OREGON QUESTION AND THE TREATY OF WASHINGTON. 425 

doubtful evidence in Paris, out of which he might, perhaps, 
make something to the prejudice of our claims, and from which 
he could set up higher claims for himself, or obscure the whole 
matter still further." And no less well, in my judgment, did 
Lord Brougham " deny that a negotiator, in carrying on a con- 
troversy, as representing his own country with a foreign country^ 
is bound to disclose to the other party whatever he may know 
that tells against his own country and for the opposite party ; 
any more than an advocate is bound to tell the court all that 
he deems to make against his own client and for his adversary." 
A just nation, like a just man, will never set up a claim which 
it knows to have no foundation ; but both nations and individu- 
als may withhold from an opposite party, (except where they are 
under question upon oath,) any evidence which would weaken 
a claim which they believe to be well founded, without subject- 
ing themselves to any rightful impeachment of their honor or 
good faith. 

I repeat, Mr. Chairman, that this attempt to destroy the con- 
fidence of the American people in the fairness of the British 
government, and to produce the impression that they have dis- 
honestly deprived us of a portion of our territory, and are now 
openly chuckling over the success of an avowed fraud, cannot 
be too strongly reprobated. The direct tendency of such a 
course is to create an exasperated popular feeling towards Great 
Britain, which will forbid the settlement of any future dispute 
with that power, except by the sword; which will henceforth 
acknowledge the validity of no red lines, but those which shall 
have been run with blood ; and which will lead inevitably, and 
at no distant day, to war for Oregon. I trust that this is not the 
design of the Chairman of the Committee of Foreign Affairs. 

But the honorable gentleman has not been content with charg- 
ing fraud upon the British Government in relation to the late 
treaty. He has told us that this treaty was accomplished and 
consummated against the unanimous sentiment of the people of 
Maine. Sir, I should like to know where the honorable gentle- 
man has found the evidence of this unanimous sentiment of the 
people of Maine against the treaty of Washington. The Com- 
missioners of Maine were on the spot during the whole period 

36* 



426 THE OREGON QUESTION AND THE TREATY OF WASHINGTON. 



of its negotiation. They prepared, it is true, a somewhat ela- 
borate argument against relinquishing any part of their temto- 
rial claim. But what did they do afterwards ? How did they 
conclude that argument ? They gave their formal and unani- 
mous assent to the arrangement which Mr. Webster and Lord 
Ashburton had agreed on. They signed the treaty. What pre- 
tence, then, is there for the assertion, that Maine was dismem- 
bered against the unanimous sentiment of her people ? 

Mr. Ingersoll (Mr. W. yielding the floor for explanation) re- 
marked, that he was sorry this matter was gone into, but the 
gentleman from Massachusetts provoked him to say (he did not 
mean any thing offensive) that he (Mr. I.) had in his place, from 
day to day, been informed by a gentleman from Maine, no 
longer a member of this House, that all that had been brought 
about by tricks, practised on the Maine Commissioners, such as 
were attempted to be practised upon Senators at the other end 
of the Capitol. 

Mr. Winthrop. And neither do I mean any thing offen- 
sive ; but I must be permitted to say, that I believe Mr. 
Webster to be quite as incapable of tricks, as the honorable 
gentleman himself, and that I demand some better evidence of 
the fact than the private whispers which the gentleman has 
retailed. Why has not the person who gave this information 
made it public before this time, upon his own responsibility ? 
If the Maine Commissioners were tricked into an assent to the 
treaty, why have they not found it out themselves, and disclosed 
the circumstances ? Sir, I deny the whole allegation. This 
effort to array an opposition against the treaty of Washington, 
in reference to the Maine boundary, is all an afterthought. At 
the time it was negotiated, it met with a very general, if not an 
unanimous, assent in both the States which were interested in 
the question ; in Maine no less than in Massachusetts. And 
even to this day, all attempts which have been made to get up 
a public sentiment against the treaty, have signally failed. That 
treaty was ratified by a vote of five sixths of the Senate ; and 
I have not the slightest belief that some of the Senators who 
voted against it, (if any of them,) would have dared to take the 
responsibility of defeating it, if their votes would have pro- 



THE OREGON QUESTION AND THE TREATY OF AVASIIINGTON. 427 

duced such a result. There is no way of securing an impunity 
in regard to any public measure, more easy and obvious, than 
to vote against it when you are certain that your vote will not 
prevent its adoption. If the measure turns out to be acceptable 
to the country, nobody will care who voted against it; while, if 
it proves to be unpopular in any quarter, you are at full liberty 
to unite in denouncing it. This is a political trick, (to borrow 
the gentleman's term,) which is often played by aspiring politi- 
cians. Whether it will account for any part of the opposition 
to the treaty of Washington, others can judge as well as myself. 
Whether it will or not, however, is of very little importance. 
The treaty has commended itself so entirely to the approbation 
of the American people, that the liberty of finding fault with it 
has proved utterly worthless. The negotiators are out with all 
the honors, and there is no chance for tricks to tell. In the 
w^iole records of diplomacy, American or European, there can 
not be found a negotiation which has been hailed with more 
undivided satisfaction by those who were interested in its 
results, than this has been by the people of the United States. 
Its influence will not soon be lost on the civilized world. It 
will stand on the pages of history, as a noble example of what 
may be accomplished by the honest arts of Peace, and will im- 
press with the force of conviction on the nations of the earth, 
the lesson which they have been so long in learning, that war is 
not the only resort, or the best resort, for settling international 
disputes, but that true honor may be maintained, real interest 
secured, just pride preserved, without the sacrifice of a single 
life, or the libation of one drop of blood ! 

The honorable gentleman has alluded to Mr. Calhoun, and 
has expressed his gratification that he has accepted the appoint- 
ment of Secretary of State. Has he forgotten that one of the 
ablest speeches made in the Senate of the United States, in 
support of the late treaty, was made by this distinguished states- 
man of South Carolina ? Has he forgotten, too, that the crown- 
ing glory of that treaty, in Mr. Calhoun's estimation, was that 
it would establish " a permanent amity and peace " between 
Great Britain and the United States? "A kind Providence 
(said Mr. Calhoun) has cast our lot on a portion of the globe 



428 THE OREGON QUESTION AND THE TREATY OF WASHINGTON. 

sufficiently vast to satisfy the most grasping ambition, and 
abounding in resom-ces beyond all others, which only require to 
be fully developed to make us the greatest and most prosperous 
people on earth." "Peace," said he, "is indeed our policy. 
Peace is the first of our wants." Why, Sir, if the honorable 
gentleman will turn to the speech of this political friend and 
brother democrat of his, he will find it as copious in its eulogies 
on the blessings of peace, as any of the more recent speeches in 
the Senate, which he has ridiculed under the title of sermons. 
I honor Mr. Calhoun for such expressions. Let him carry into 
the negotiations upon the Oregon question, the same spirit which 
he manifested in relation to the Treaty of Washington, let him 
" seek peace and ensue it," in his management of our foreign 
affairs, and he w411 have earned a title to the regard of all good 
men and true patriots. I rejoice to believe that he will do so. 
On the subject of Oregon, indeed, he is already committed to a 
pacific policy. The honorable gentleman is quite mistaken in 
his idea of Mr. Calhoun's argument against the bill for the armed 
occupation of Oregon last winter. There was nothing what- 
ever in that argument to give the impression that Mr. Calhoun 
was in favor of giving this notice now or at any early day. On 
the contrary, the whole strain and stress of the argument was in 
favor of abstaining altogether from any action upon the subject. 
" There is often," said Mr. Calhoun, " in the affairs of govern- 
ment, more efficiency and wisdom in non-action than in action. 
All we want, to effect our object in this case, is a wise and mas- 
terly inactivity." " Our population," said he, " will soon — far 
sooner than anticipated — reach the Rocky Mountains, and be 
ready to pour into the Oregon Territory, when it will come into 
our possession without resistance or struggle ; or, if there should 
be resistance, it would be feeble and ineffectual. We would then 
be as much stronger there, comparatively, than Great Britain, 
as she is now stronger than we are ; and it would then be as idle 
in her to attempt to assert or maintain her exclusive claim to the 
Territory against us, as it would now be in us to attempt it 
against her. Let us be wise, and abide our time, and it will 
accomplish all that we desire, with far more certainty, and with 
infinitely less sacrifice, than we can without it." 



THE OREGON QUESTION AND THE TKEATY OF WASHINGTON. 429 

I have no idea, Mr. Chairman, that it will be in oar power, 
under present circumstances, to avail ourselves of this good 
advice of Mr. Calhoun, or that he will find himself able, in his 
new capacity, to leave this question to the operation of time. 
The ill-advised and most unseasonable debates on this subject, 
wiiich have taken place in both branches of Congress during the 
last two years, have not only created an impatience, in some 
quarters of the country, which will brook no further delay ; but 
have so roused the attention of the British Government to our 
policy, as to forbid the idea, that they would acquiesce in any 
further postponement of the question. A new minister from 
England has, indeed, arrived, who is well understood to be spe- 
cially charged with the negotiation of it. And it is now to be 
decided, so far as this House is concerned, in what spirit that 
negotiation shall be conducted. Shall it be entered on, by this 
government, in that spirit of menace and defiance which has 
characterized the whole speech of the honorable gentleman from 
Pennsylvania ; or in that spirit of courtesy and magnanimity 
which becomes a civilized and Christian, as well as a brave and 
powerful nation ? 

Sir, I have already declared my opinion that the required 
notice for the termination of the joint occupation of Oregon 
ought not to be given at this moment, in view of our own do- 
mestic condition. But a hundred-fold more ill-advised does such 
a proceeding strike me, in view of our immediate relations to the 
British Government. In my judgment, it would be an act of 
rudeness, of indecency, of offence, as unworthy as it would be 
wanton. What possible pretence of expediency or necessity is 
there for such a course ? Here is an ambassador on the ground, 
ready at any instant to go into negotiations with us on the sub- 
ject. But for the deplorable catastrophe which has recently 
deprived the President of two members of his cabinet, those 
negotiations would have already been entered on. And is this a 
moment, — when we have seen no disadvantage and no disgrace 
in this joint occupation during a term of thirty years, when all 
Presidents and all parties have acquiesced in its continuance 
throughout that long period, — is this a moment for insisting on 
its being brought to a close ? Is this a respectful or even a respect- 



430 THE OREGON QUESTION AND THE TREATY OF WASHINGTON. 

able mode of meeting the overtures of the British Government for 
a settlement of the Oregon question ? Will it give us an increased 
hope of effecting such a settlement amicably, honorably, satis- 
factorily, to tell the British minister, " Sir, we will allow a year 
for this business. At the end of that time, we shall cry havoc, 
and let slip the dogs of war?" The honorable gentleman has 
alluded to the code of honor, and to the manner of settling diffi- 
culties among gentlemen. There are those present, doubtless, 
who understand the nice points of that code. What would be 
thought by them, if, while negotiations of this sort were pending, 
one of the parties should undertake to limit the time within 
which there must be a settlement or a fight? Undoubtedly, Mr. 
Chairman, we have a right to give such a notice to Great Britain, 
but, in my judgment, the exercise of that right at this moment 
would not only tend to protract, embarrass, and ultimately defeat 
the negotiations which are now about to be opened, but would 
impair the honor of this nation in the estimation of the civilized 
world. We should be reproached and rebuked for it by the 
general sense cff Europe. And is the American character abroad 
at so high a mark at this moment, that we can afford to trifle 
with it? True, Sir, many of the censures which have recently 
been cast on this Republic are unreasonable. Perhaps I might 
agree with the honorable gentleman from Pennsylvania, that the 
attacks which have been made upon the character and honesty 
of his own Commonwealth, and which seem to have so sharp- 
ened the edge of his acrimony against England, are a good deal 
overcharged. At any rate, I feel as strongly as any one the 
injustice of involving the whole nation in the repudiation of 
two or three of the separate States ; and the same discrimina- 
tion between the acts of individual States and the acts of the 
United States may, I am aware, be pleaded in explanation of 
other circumstances which have brought reproach from some 
quarters upon our national good name. But the fact is not less 
true, nor less lamentable, that our character as a nation, in one 
way or another, justly or unjustly, has been not a little lowered, 
of late years, in the regard of foreign nations. Now, Sir, for 
whatever we do in relation to this question of Oregon, we can 
set up no divided responsibility. The Nation, as a Nation, must 



THE OREGON QUESTION AND THE TREATY OP AVASUINGTON. 431 

do whatever is done; and the Nation, as a Nation, must be held 
answerable. Let us, then, forbear from pursuing any course, 
from taking any step, from expressing any purpose, which may 
give color to a new stain upon our national character. Let us 
desist from all action and all discussion of this subject until Mr. 
Pakenham has, at least, opened his budget, and until our own 
Government, too, is in a condition to pursue with vigor and effect 
whatever policy we may ultimately be compelled to adopt. 

But the honorable gentleman from Pennsylvania finds nothing 
to regret in the state of opinion abroad as to the American 
character ; he even rejoices at the violent and vituperative tone 
of the British press in relation to his own State. And why ? 
Because he thinks it may have a tendency to counteract the 
idolatrous disposition which exists in some parts of this country 
towards Great Britain I Mr. Chairman, I know of nothing more 
worthy of condemnation in the political history of the present 
day, than the systematic effort of the self-styled Democratic 
party of this country to stir up a prejudice against England 
upon every occasion, and to create an impression that every man 
who does not fall in with their principles and their policy is in 
some sort of British interest, or under some kind of British in- 
fluence. There are some of the leaders of this party, with 
whom hatred to England would seem to be the only standard 
of American patriotism, and with whom it seems to be enough 
to determine their course upon all questions either of right or of 
expediency, to know what will be most offensive to the British 
power. War, war with England, is the ever-burning passion of 
their soul ; and any one who pursues a policy or advocates a 
measure which may postpone or avert the consummation which 
they so devoutly desire, becomes the chosen object of their in- 
sinuations and reproaches. For myself, Sir, I hold in utter con- 
tempt all such insinuations. If it be a fit subject for reproach, 
to entertain the most anxious and ardent desire for the peace of 
this country, its peace with England, its peace with all the world, 
I submit myself willingly to the fullest measure of that reproach. 
War between the United States and Great Britain for Oregon ! 
Sir, there is something in this idea too monstrous to be enter- 
tained for a moment. The two greatest nations on the globe, 



432 THE OREGOiSr QUESTION AND THE TREATY OF ^YASHINGTON. 

with more territorial possessions than they know what to do with 

already, and bound together by so many ties of kindred, and 

language, and commercial interest, going to war for a piece of 

barren earth I Why, it would put back the cause of civilization 

a whole century, and would be enough not merely to call down 

the rebuke of men, but the curse of God. I do not yield to the 

honorable gentleman in a just concern for the national honor. 

I am ready to maintain that honor, whenever it is really at stake, 

against Great Britain as readily as against any other nation. 

Indeed, if war is to come upon us, I am quite willing that it 

should be war with a first-rate power — with a foeman worthy 

of our steel. 

'■ Oh ! the blood more stirs, 

To rouse a lion, than to start a hare."' 

If the young Queen of England were the veritable Victoria 
whom the ancient poets have sometimes described as descending 
from the right hand of Jupiter to crown the banner of predestined 
Triumph, I would still not shrink from the attempt to vindicate 
the rights of my country on every proper occasion. To her 
forces, however, as well as to ours, may come the " cita mors,^ 
as well as the " Victoria IrclaP We have nothing to fear from 
a protracted war with any nation, though our want of prepara- 
tion misht sive us the worst of it in the first encounter. We 
are all and always ready for war, when there is no other alterna- 
tive for maintaining our country's honor. We are all and always 
ready for any war into which a Christian man, in a civilized land, 
and in this age of the world, can have the face to enter. But I 
thank God that there are very few such cases. War and honor 
are fast getting to have less and less to do with each other. The 
highest honor of any country is to preserve peace, even under 
provocations which might justify war. The deepest disgrace to 
any country is to plunge into war under circumstances which 
leave the honorable alternative of peace. I heartily hope and 
trust, Sir, that in deference to the sense of the civilized world, 
in deference to that spirit of Christianity which is now spreading 
its benign and healing influences over both hemispheres with 
such signal rapidity, we shall explore the whole field of diplo- 
macy, and exhaust every art of negotiation, before we give loose 



THE OREGON QUESTION AND THE TREATY OP WASHINGTON. 433 

to that passion for conflict which the honorable gentleman from 
Pennsylvania seems to regard as so grand and glorious an cle- 
ment of the American character. 

But Great Britain is so grasping, so aggressive, so insidious 
and insolent, so overreaching and overbearing! Does not her 
banner flout us at every turn? Does not her drum-beat disturb 
our dreams by night, and almost drown our voices by day ? Is 
she not hemming us in on every side ; compassing us about in 
a daily diminishing circle ; and are not our outer walls ah-eady 
tottering at the sound of her trumpets ? Nay, have not her bland- 
ishments succeeded even where, as yet, her arms have failed ? 
Has she not scaled our very ramparts and penetrated to our very 
citadel in a shower of corrupting gold? What but British gold 
carried the last Presidential election against the people ? What 
but British gold is about to carry the next ? What were the 
twelve hundred and seventy-five thousand voters who deposed 
Mr. Van Buren from the chief magistracy in 1840, and who are 
rallying again, with renewed energy, to the old watchwords, 
against his restoration, but so many British Whigs ? Is there 
a Whig, in all the land, who dares deny, that when he voted for 
General Harrison, he had a British heart in his bosom, and a 
British sovereign in his pocket? — Mr. Chairman, let me call to 
the remembrance of the committee a story which was introduced 
by the celebrated George Canning into one of his speeches in the 
House of Commons, and which has thus the highest sanction as 
being not beneath the dignity of parliamentary debate. It is the 
story of a painter, who had made himself somewhat eminent in 
the professional sphere in which he moved, but who had directed 
his art altogether to one favorite subject. This subject was a 
red lion, which he had learned to depict in great perfection. One 
of his earliest patrons was the keeper of a public house, who 
wished something appropriate painted on his sign-board. The 
painter, of course, executed his red lion. A gentleman in the 
vicinity, who had a new mansion-house which he wished to have 
ornamented, was the next employer of the artist, and, in order 
to afford him full scope for his genius, gave him his own choice 
of a subject for the principal panel in his dining-room. The 
artist took time to deliberate, and then said, with the utmost 

37 



4C4 THE OREGON QUESTION AND THE TREATY OF WASHINGTON. 

gravity, " don't you think that a handsome red lion would have 
a fine effect in this situation ? " The gentleman, as you may 
imagine, did not feel quite satisfied with the selection, but resolved 
to let the painter follow his own fancy in this instance, trusting to 
have a design of more elegance and distinction in his drawing- 
room or library, to which he next conducted him. " Here," said 
he, '' I must have something striking; the space is small, and the 
device must be proportionably delicate." The painter paused ; 
appeared to dive down to the very bottom of his invention and 
thence to ascend again to its highest heaven for an idea, and then 
said, " what do you think of a small red lion ? " 

Well now. Sir, the course of a certain class of politicians in 
this country seems to me to have a most marvellous analogy to 
that of the painter in this story. This cry of British Whigs, 
this clamor about British gold, this never-ending alarum about 
British aggression and British encroachment, this introduction of 
the red lion on every occasion, seems to be the one great reli- 
ance of the political artists of a certain school. There is always 
a lion in the path of the self-styled Democratic party of the 
United States ; a British lion, red with the blood of cruelty and 
oppression, which it is their peculiar mission to slay, but which 
the Whigs are leagued together to defend. Whatever principle, 
whatever project, may be under discussion in this House, or 
before the people, the red lion is sure to be on the ground. Red 
lion here, red lion there, red lion everywhere ! Why, Sir, even 
on the question of refunding to General Jackson the fine which 
was imposed on him for setting at defiance the civil authorities 
of the land, and imprisoning the judge who dared to confront 
him with a writ of habeas corpus, it was thought " that a small 
red lion might have a fine effect in that situation." And a very 
small one it certainly was. It was suggested that the judge was 
an Englishman by birth. He was known to have come over to 
America in early youth. His residence here could be traced 
back to the fifteenth or sixteenth year of his age; but there was 
reason to apprehend, though even that was not altogether certain, 
that he was born in England ; and, therefore, all those who were 
unwilling to annul his judicial decree, and to admit that he was 
rio-htfully insulted and imprisoned, were little better than so many 



THE OREGON QUESTION AND THE TREATY OF WASHINGTON. 435 

British Whigs. Was not that, Sir, a very little red lion indeed? 
This Oregon question, however, presents a larger panel, and here, 
of course, a flaming lion is shov^ai up in its full dimensions. 
The Texas question affords a larger field still, with far more 
room for the fancy to expatiate in ; and although the canvas is 
but just unrolled, the teeming invention of these unrivalled artists 
has already done its work, with something of that celerity which 
Milton has so glowingly attributed to Creative Power: 

" Now half appeared 
The tawny lion, pawing to get free 
His hinder parts, then springs, as hroke from bonds, 
And rampant shakes his brinded mane ! " 

Mr. Chairman, is it possible that the honorable gentleman 
from Pennsylvania and his political friends can be mad enough 
to believe that the people of this country can be wrought upon 
by such conceits? Let me assure them that they do injustice 
to the intelligence of the people. "'Tis the eye of childhood 
that fears a painted devil." The manly sense of this nation will 
scorn such appeals to fear and folly. Conscious of their own 
integrity, and resolved on the vindication of their own rights, 
the people will neither be frightened from their propriety, nor 
diverted from their purpose, by such devices. They proved this 
in 1840 ; they will make assurance doubly sure in 1844. 

A word or two about Texas, and I have done. The honorable 
gentleman from Pennsylvania, among other most inconclusive 
reasons for the adoption of the resolution which has been con- 
demned as inexpedient by the committee over which he presides, 
has told us, that " he holds it to be incompetent for the mere treaty- 
making power to part with any portion of the territory of the 
United States, or to settle a boundary question, without the 
consent and cooperation of the House of Representatives." 
And he has appealed to the Massachusetts delegation, and called 
upon myself in particular, " as one who has loudly expressed an 
apprehension of the stealthy annexation of Texas to this Union 
by a clandestine treaty," to unite with him on this analogous 
question of Oregon, and insist on the right of Representative 
action on the subject. Sir, I shall enter into no argument as 



436 THE OREGON QUESTION AND THE TREATY OF WASHINGTON. 

to the extent of the treaty-making power of this Government 
in regard to the particular measures which the gentleman has 
specified in his proposition. Even if I assented to the full import 
of that proposition, which I certainly do not, it would form no 
ground for that union with him on the pending question, to which 
he invites me. Even if it were the admitted prerogative of this 
House to give advice or prescribe action to the Executive on the 
subjects he has named, it would be no reason for our giving bad 
advice, or prescribing injudicious or unwarrantable action. But 
" the analogous questions " of Oregon and Texas ! Sir, I deny 
that there is any analogy whatever between those questions. 
The Texas question is not in any sense a question of parting 
with territory or settling a boundary line. It is not even a 
question of annexing territory. It is a question of amalgamat- 
ing a foreign sovereignty with our own sovereignty ; of annexing 
a foreign State to our own State. It is such a question as would 
be presented by a proposition to reannex the United States to 
Great Britain, or to amalgamate Great Britain with the United 
States. This, the gentleman must remember, was the distinc- 
tion taken by Mr. Van Buren and Mr. Forsyth in 1837. They 
maintained, that " the question of the annexation of a foreign 
independent State to the United States had never before been 
presented to this Government." They maintained, that the cir- 
cumstance of Louisiana and Florida being colonial possessions 
of France and Spain, rendered the purchase of those Territories 
materially different from the proposed annexation of Texas. 
" Whether the Constitution of the United States," they added, 
"contemplated the annexation of such a State, and, if so, in what 
manner that object is to be effected, are questions, in the opinion 
of the President, which it would be inexpedient, under present 
circumstances, to agitate." 

And now, Mr. Chairman, I go much farther than the honorable 
gentleman from Pennsylvania, on this subject. I not only deny 
the competency of the treaty-making power of this Government 
to negotiate any such amalgamation as this, without the coupe- 
ration of the House of Representatives ; but I deny that our co- 
operation can confer or supply that competency. Certainly, 
certainly, the Constitution did not contemplate the annexation 



THE OREGON QUESTION AND THE TREATY OF AYASHINUTON. 437 

of such a State. Provoco ad populum ! The people, in their 
own right, are alone competent to pronounce the doom, which is 
to bind up the fortunes of this Republic in the same bundle of 
life or death with those of any foreign power; and I iiope and 
believe that they will disown and renounce any Executive or any 
Legislative act, which shall infringe upon this — their own su- 
preme prerogative. I trust that they will not be deluded by any 
false alarm, by any red lion representation, that Texas is about 
to be made a colonial possession of Great Britain. The British 
Government have no such purpose. Our own Government 
know this. And if Texas be foisted into the Union ujion any 
such pretence, it will be an act as fraudulent in its inception, as 
it will, under any circumstances, be pernicious in its result. 



37 * 



THE ANNEXATION OF TEXAS. 

A SPEECH DELIVERED IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES OF THE UNI- 
TED STATES, IN COMMITTEE OF THE WHOLE ON THE STATE OF THE 
UNION, JANUARY 6, 1845. 



I HAVE very little hope, Mr. Chairman, of saying any thing 
new on the question before us, or of giving any new interest or 
force to the views which have already been presented, both to 
Congress and the Country, by the master minds of the nation. 
Certainly, I have not risen to attempt any formal response to 
the challenge which was tendered me a few days since by the 
chairman of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, (Mr. C.J. Inger- 
soll.) That gentleman was pleased to call on me emphatically 
for an argument. He was particular in warning me against 
declamation. He would be contented with nothing short of an 
argument. Now, Sir, I must be allowed to say that such a call, 
and such a caution, would have come with something of a better 
grace from the honorable member, if he had given me the exam- 
ple as well as the precept. If he had " reck'd his own rede," 
and had given to the House something better than a desultory 
string of bald assertions and balder assumptions, he might have 
thrown down the gauntlet to whom he pleased. But I must 
protest that it was a little ungracious in the honorable member, 
to urge upon me the steep and thorny way of arguing a nega- 
tive, after sauntering along the primrose path of dalliance him- 
self, with the burden of the atlirmative fairly upon his own 
shoulders. 

The honorable member from Alabama, (Mr. Payne,) who 
spoke last, was somewhat in the same vein. " He would not 
entertain the House with a mere Fourth of July oration." He, 
too, wanted nothing but an argument. Now, with all deference 



THE ANNEXATION OF TEXAS. 439 

to the better judgment of the honorable member, I must be 
allowed to express a doubt, whether a good Fourth of July 
oration would not be one of the best arguments that could be 
framed for this precise occasion. When men seem ready to 
forget their own country, and to run after foreign alliances ; to 
disregard the feelings of their fellow-citizens, and expend their 
sympathies upon aliens ; and to look more to the security of 
slavery than of freedom ; it seems to me, Mr. Chairman, that 
some remembrance of the Fourth of July; that some recalling 
and recounting of the early days, and the early deeds of our 
Revolution ; that some reminiscences of the period when Vir- 
ginia, and South Carolina, and Massachusetts, were bound 
together by mutual league, by united thoughts and counsels, by 
equal hope and hazard in the glorious enterprise of Independ- 
ence ; that some recurrence to the opinions, as well as to the 
acts, of our patriot fathers ; their opinions about freedom, and 
about what constituted " an extension of the area of freedom ;" 
their opinions, too, about slavery, in those days, when one of the 
greatest complaints against Great Britain was, not that she con- 
sidered slavery an evil, and, having abolished it at great cost in 
her own colonies, had expressed a wish, — no further harm, — 
a wish that it might be abolished throughout the world, — but 
that she regarded it as the source of a profitable traffic ; that 
she would not suffer South Carolina and Virginia to abolish it; 
and had even reprimanded a Governor of South Carolina for 
assenting to an act for that purpose; — it seems to me, I say, 
that some such Fourth of July oration as this, would be an 
argument every way suitable and seasonable. 

At any rate, the stricter argument of this case belongs right- 
fully to those in favor of the annexation. It belongs to those 
who seek to accomplish this momentous change in our national 
condition and our national identity. It belongs to those who 
are dissatisfied with their existing country, and who are ready 
to peril its peace, its honor, and its union, in order to obtain 
another and an ampler theatre for their transcendent patriotism. 
It is for them to argue this question. It is for them to make a 
case. It is for them, to show the consummate policy of the 
measure. It is for them, above all, to prove their constitutional 
power to accomplish it. 



440 THE ANNEXATION OF TEXAS. 

As for us, Mr. Chairman, who seek no change, who are con- 
tent with our country as it is, who look to its augmentation 
by internal development and not by external acquisition, whose 
only policy it is to improve, build up, illustrate, and defend the 
land and the liberties we now enjoy, — we might well be excused 
from arguments of any sort on such a subject. It would be 
enough for us to sit quietly in our seats, and, when called on to 
give our voices upon these resolutions, to say of our country, as 
the barons of old England said of their laws, when threatened 
with usurpation : Nblumiis, nolumiis miitari I 

Sir, I desire to press this point upon the consideration and 
upon the consciences of gentlemen around me ; and more espe- 
cially of those who, being associated politically with the friends of 
annexation, are understood to entertain doubts as to the consti- 
tutionality of the scheme proposed. We have a Constitution. 
We have sworn to support it. It is a Constitution of limited 
powers — of specific grants of power. It declares in its own 
terms that " the enumeration of certain rights shall not be con- 
strued to deny or disparage others retained by the people." It 
declares further, that " the powers not delegated to the United 
States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, 
are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." It is 
thus the duty of every man who gives his support to a measure 
of legislation, to be convinced in his own mind that the measure 
is positively constitutional. It is not for him to call for argu- 
ments from others to prove it unconstitutional. It is not for him 
to find justification for his vote in the feebleness or in the silence 
of those who deny his power, but in the force and the convin- 
cing proof of those who maintain it. Still less is it for him to 
adopt the extraordinary doctrine advanced by an honorable 
member from Alabama, (Mr. Belser,) who has told us that, in 
case of constitutional difficulty on this question, he should follow 
the maxim of Hoyle : " Where you are in doubt, take the trick I " 
Northern gentlemen have often been charged with latitudina- 
rianism in their interpretation of the Constitution. They pro- 
fess to be always in favor of a liberal construction of it. But 
they have never yet carried their liberality to such a pitch as 
this. It may be the attribute of a good judge to amplify his 



THE ANNEXATION OF TEXAS. 441 

jurisdiction ; but wc hold it to be the duty of an honest republi- 
can legislator, under a limited Government like ours, to exercise 
no doubtful powers ; and to believe nothing constitutional with- 
out a reason, a substantial reason, for the faith that is in him. 

I am not at all surprised, however, at the disposition which 
has been manifested in some quarters to shift the burden of 
proof, and to call for arguments from others, instead of attempt- 
ing to make a case for themselves. Unquestionably the friends 
of Texas in this House have a heavy task on their hands. Un- 
able to agree upon any plan among themselves ; having exhaust- 
ed every art for reconciling their discordant opinions; the ultima 
ratio of a letter from the Hermitage, even, having been resorted 
to in vain ; the old Roman cement having altogether lost its 
cohesive quality upon this occasion ; their only hope seems now 
to be, that, by throwing all their individual schemes before the 
Committee, the blows of their enemies may prove more efficient 
than the love-pats of their friends, and may knock some one of 
them into a shape, or impress upon some one of them a color, 
which will secure for it the support of a majority. I have reason 
to think that the members from Massachusetts, and of the North- 
ern States generally, are relied upon to perform a principal part 
in this moulding and coloring process. It seems to be hoped 
that the anti-slavery feeling which we are supposed to represent, 
will exhibit itself to such an excess, will be betrayed into such 
an intemperate outbreak upon this question, as to embarrass the 
position of some of our Whig friends from the South, and either 
to compel them to vote for annexation now, or to stimulate the 
States which they represent to send back to the next Congress 
those who will. 

Such, Mr. Chairman, is the forlorn hope of the friends of 
Texas at this moment. I trust they will be disappointed in it. 
They have already elected a President under some such influ- 
ence. But I rejoice to believe that they will fail in annexing 
Texas by it, at this session at least. I certainly, for one, shall 
minister to no such mischief. I have no hesitation in saying 
that I shall oppose the annexation of Texas, now and always, 
upon the ground that it involves an extension of domestic 
slavery. No considerations of National aggrandizement; no 



442 THE ANNEXATION OF TEXAS. 

allurements of Northern interest and advantage; were they even 
as real, as in this case they are specious and delusive; will 
ever win my assent to such an enlargement of the slave-holding 
territory of my country. Nor shall I hesitate to speak of slavery 
in connection with this question, if my time be not exhausted 
before I reach that topic in the order of my remarks. I shall do 
so firmly and fearlessly, as I have always done in this House 
and elsewhere ; but I shall do so in a spirit of entire deference 
to the Constitution, which I have sworn to support, and which 
it is my special purpose in these remarks to maintain and vindi- 
cate. I shall speak of slavery, too, with the most unqualified 
admission, which no Northern statesman has ever withheld, that 
over slavery, as it now exists within any of the existing States 
of the Union, this government has no manner of control. 

No, Sir, this question is not to be settled in this manner, or 
in any manner, I trust, at the present session. As often, indeed, 
as I reflect on its magnitude, I find it difficult to realize that it 
is really and in good faith before us for decision. Certainly, 
Mr. Chairman, it is impossible for me to reconcile, with any 
views which I entertain of the nature of our government and 
the character of our Constitution, the idea that such a question 
as this can be decided finally and forever, here and now, by this 
Congress, in this way, under these circumstances. An irrevoca- 
ble incorporation into our Union of a vast foreign nation; the 
naturalization, by a stroke of the pen, of I know not how many 
thousand Mexicans, and of all the other aliens who may have 
resided six months in Texas ; the admission of five-and-twenty 
thousand slaves into our country, in defiance of that compro- 
mise of the Constitution and laws under which no slaves were 
to be admitted after the year 1808 ; the annexation of a terri- 
tory large enough to alter all the relations and destroy all the 
balances of our existing system, of a capacity not merely for 
adding new stars to our Constellation, but for disturbing the 
courses, and even changing the orbits, of those which are now 
revolving in harmony together — for turning them upon a new 
centre and towards another sun ; that such a measure should 
be initiated, carried on, and consummated as this has been, and 
is now proposed to be, is, in my judgment, monstrous, mon- 
strous beyoi d all expression. 



THE ANNEXATION OP TEXAS. 443 

What, Sir, is the brief history of this measure ? Secretly 
and stealthily concocted originally by a President not of the 
people's choice, by an accidental occupant of the Executive 
chair; devised by him for his own ambitious ends, and upon 
his own individual responsibility; — let me rather say irrespon- 
sibility, (for the history of the last twelve or fifteen years has 
proved that our Republican President is the most irresponsible 
officer known to the civilized world, and may do with impunity 
what would cost many a king his crown, neck and all,) — re- 
jected emphatically by the Senate, to whom," as a legitimate 
branch of the treaty-making power, it was submitted ; it has 
now been introduced into this House, after a single hour's deli- 
beration in the Committee on Foreign Affairs, and is about to be 
pressed to a decision with as little ceremony as an act to pay 
an annual salary, or to establish a new post route ! Why, Sir, 
if it were a mere question of foreign relations, — if it concerned 
no interest, affected no right, touched no prerogative of our own 
American people, a course like this would be extraordinary 
enough; but, reaching as this measure does to the very sum of 
our own domestic affairs, influencing, as it will, the whole des- 
tiny of our country as long as our country may survive it, such 
a mode of proceeding is calculated to excite alarm in the breast 
of every reflecting patriot. 

Mr. Chairman, there are many distinct views to be taken of 
this transaction, either of which would more than exhaust the 
little time allowed us under the hour rule. There is the Execu- 
tive view of it ; displaying as much of assumption and usurpa- 
tion, in all its civil and all its military developments, as has ever 
signalized an equal period in the history of the most despotic 
ruler in Christendom. There is the Diplomatic view of it ; 
exhibiting a correspondence which, I venture to say, has made 
more than are willing to acknowledge it, blush, and cover their 
faces in shame, at such a degradation of our national character 
before the world. I am glad to find that even the Chairman of 
the Committee on Foreign Affairs has not been quite able to 
suppress an intimation of disgust for some of the State papers 
and diplomatic correspondence of the case. 

There is the Texan view of the question, too. Sir, I have 



444 THE ANNEXATION OF TEXAS. 

never cherished any particular sympathy for the people of Texas. 
I have heretofore been rather inclined to agree with Governor 
McDuffie in the views presented in an admirable message of his 
to the Legislature of South Carolina in December, 1836; in 
which he not only expressed the opinion that " if we should ad- 
mit Texas into our Union while Mexico is still waging war 
against that Province, with a view to reestablish her supremacy 
over it, we should, by the very act itself, make ourselves a party 
to the war," and that we could not " take this step without 
incurring this heavy responsibility, until Mexico herself shall 
recognize the independence of her revolted Province ; " but in 
which he said also, " I am utterly at a loss to perceive what title 
either of the parties to this controversy can have to the sympa- 
thies of the American people. If it be alleged that the insur- 
gents of Texas are emigrants from the United States, it -is ob- 
vious to reply that, by their voluntary expatriation, under what- 
ever circumstances of adventure, of speculation, of honor, or of 
infamy, they have forfeited all claim to our paternal regard. If 
it be true that they have left a land of freedom for a land of 
despotism, they have done it with their eyes open, and deserve 
their destiny." Perhaps this language is a little too severe, but 
I am clearly of opinion that men who have deserted their own 
cotintry for a foreign soil, are not preeminently entitled to our 
freshest and most cordiaj sympathies. 

I confess, however, that recent circumstances have created 
something of reaction in my mind in regard to the people of 
Texas. I cannot help feeling some sympathy with that peo- 
ple under the precise circumstances in which they are now 
placed ; betrayed, as they have been, into so humiliating a pos- 
ture, by false pretences and false promises. Where has been 
the fulfilment of that promise which a President of the United 
States, speaking through his Secretary of State, dared to hold 
out to them a year ago : " Measures have been taken to ascer- 
tain the opinions and views of Senators upon the subject, and 
it is found that a clear constitutional majority of two thirds are 
in favor of the measure ! " Sir, may we not begin to entertain 
a hope that the people of Texas will awake to some respect 
for themselves under the treatment they have received, and will 



THE ANNEXATION OF TEXAS. 445 

no longer suffer themselves to be duped and trilled with either 
by Presidents or Congresses ? If they would summon up 
something of a just national pride, repel all fnrther overtures 
to annexation, expose all the arts and intrigues by which Ihey 
have been seduced, and resolve to maintain their stand as an 
independent nation against Mexico and against the world, the 
"God speed" of all good men would go with them. There 
seems to be some probability of such a movement. The Chair- 
man of the Committee on Foreign Affairs has warned us of 
the danger of delay. " There is nothing to be dreaded," says 
he, " but delay. Delay is imminently dangerous." And why 
is delay dangerous ? Because, says he, » there must be in 
Texas a great deal of personal selfish opposition to annexation. 
Many eminent men may oppose it." What a confession is 
this I So we are not only to get the start of the sober second 
thought of our own American people upon this question, but of 
the people of Texas, too I We are to take a snap judgment on 
the willingness of both nations to enter upon this fatal mar- 
riage ! 

But I turn to even graver views of the subject. When the 
measure was originajly reported from the Committee of which 
I have the honor to be a member, I denounced it off-hand as 
unconstitutional in substance and unconstitutional in form ; as 
in violation of the law of nations, and of the good faith of our 
own country; as calculatecT to involve us in an unjust and dis- 
honorable war; and as eminently objectionable from its rela- 
tions to the subject of domestic slavery. The honorable mem- 
ber from Alabama (Mr. Payne) has been pleased to denominate 
this my manifesto^ and has done me the undeserved honor of 
considering me the spokesman of my ])arty in pronouncing it. 
I spoke for nobody but myself then, and am authorized to speak 
for nobody but myself now. But I repeat the, expressions de- 
liberately this morning, and shall take them as my text in what 
remains of my hour. 

And first, Mr* Chairman, I am one of those who deny the 

authority of this government to annex a foreign nation to our 

Union, by any process whatever, short of the general consent of 

the people ; certainly by any mode less formal than that required. 

38 



446 THE ANNEXATION OF TEXAS. 

for an amendment of the Constitution. Gentlemen tell us that 
this point was settled by the purchase of Louisiana and Florida. 
No, no, Sir, it was not settled by either of those cases. What 
said Mr. Van Buren in 1837 ? What said Mr. Forsyth, ex- 
pressing, as he undoubtedly did, the result of the deliberations 
of Mr. Van Buren's entire Cabinet? His official reply to Mr. 
Memucan Hunt has been often quoted, but cannot be too often 
held up before the eyes of the people : — 

" The question of the annexation of a foreign independent State to the United 
States has never before been presented to this government. Since the adoption of 
their Constitution, two large additions have been made to the domain originally- 
claimed by the United States." 

" The circumstance, however, of their being colonial possessions of France and 
Spain, and therefore dependent on the metropolitan governments, renders those trans- 
actions materially different from that which would be presented by the question of the 
annexation of Texas. The latter is a State, with an independent government, acknow- 
ledged as such by the United States, and claiming a territory beyond, though border- 
ing on, the region ceded by France in the treaty of the 30th of April, 1803. Whether 
the Constitution of the United States contemplated the annexation of such a State. 
and, if so, in what manner that object is to be effected, are questions, in the opinion 
of the President, it would be inexpedient, under existing circumstances, to agitate." 

Here is no pretence of the right to annex, and much less 
to reannex, Texas under the Louisiana or Florida precedents. 
Here is not a word about Texas having been sacrificed by j,the 
Florida treaty. The Texan territory is declared to be " beyond, 
though bordering on, the region ceded by France in the treaty 
of the 30th of April, 1803." The Louisiana and Florida pre- 
cedents are declared to be " materially difl'erent " from the ques- 
tion of the annexation of Texas. And the point is expressly 
proposed, as one for doubt, to say the least, whether the Con- 
stitution ever contemplated the annexation of such a State. 

But who are the persons who declare so impatiently, that the 
constitutional power of Congress to annex Texas has been set- 
tled by precedent ? They are those who deny the authority of 
precedent upon every other question but this. They are those 
by whom the idea is utterly rejected and derided, that the signa- 
tures of Washington and Madison to the charters of a National 
Bank, and the existence of such an institution for forty years, 
are to be considered as settling the constitutionafity of its incor- 



THE ANNEXATION OP TEXAS. 447 

poration ; and who arc hailing the reestablishment of the Sub- 
Treasury system as a return to the Constitution, — as a restora- 
tion of the government, under the auspices of Jackson and 
Tyler, to that state of original purity from which it was cor- 
ruptly perverted by Washington and Madison ! Cicero tells 
us of some occasion on which the Roman augurs could not 
look each other in the face without laughing ; and it would be 
even more impossible, I should imagine, for those initiated 
in the mysteries of either General Jackson's or Mr. Tyler's 
administrations, to preserve their gravity at such an idea as this. 
But who, again, are those who maintain so stoutly the binding 
obligation of precedent on this occasion ? They are those, in 
part, w^ho are just ready to make a new attempt at nullifying a 
protective tariff, although the preamble of the first Revenue 
Law upon the statute book declares, that the encouragement of 
domestic industry was one of its principal objects, and although 
every President of the United States, from Washington to Jack- 
son inclusive, has put his name to bills or messages distinctly 
recognizing the same principle! 

Sir, I am no despiser of precedents. For the deliberate de- 
cisions of our early Congresses and Cabinets upon questions of 
constitutional intention and interpretation, I entertain the most 
deferential respect. But for the Louisiana precedent, even if it 
were not " materially different" from the question before us, I 
profess to entertain no respect whatever. If it be a precedent 
for any thing, it is a precedent for the successful violation of the 
Constitution, and not for its just interpretation and execution. 
It is of that school of political morality which declares that 
" where there is a will, there is a way." It belongs to the Hoyle 
principle of action — " where you are in doubt, take the trick." 
I say this in no spirit of disrespect to Mr. Jefferson. 

Everybody knows that Mr. Jefferson himself admitted that, 
in the acquisition of Louisiana, he had done " an act beyond 
the Constitution," and that he repeatedly besought his friends to 
procure the adoption of an amendment to the Constitution to 
ratify the act. His views were such as no unprejudiced mind 
can resist. " When I consider (said he) that the limits of the 
United States are precisely fixed by the treaty of 1783, that the 



448 THE ANNEXATION OF TEXAS. 

Constitution expressly declares itself to be made for the United 
States, I cannot help believing that the intention was not to 
permit Congress to admit into the Union new States which 
should be formed out of the Territory, for which and under 
whose authority alone they were then acting, I do not believe 
it was meant that they might receive England, Ireland, Holland, 
&c., into it." 

And who can doubt that INIr. Jefferson was right in this judg- 
ment? Who can imagine that the people of 1789 intended to 
make a Constitution for any country but their own country ; or 
ever dreamed that they were giving authority to their temporary 
representatives, to yoke them in, to bind up their fortunes for- 
ever, with any foreign nation, which, by its scrip or its land 
warrants, or by any other influence, worthy or unworthy, might 
have obtained favor in our legislative councils? 

The honorable member from Alabama considered this w^hole 
question settled by the express authority of Congress to " admit 
new States." Even his interpretation of the Constitution, how- 
ever, would not cover the present proposition. Here is a terri- 
tory to be acquired, as well as a State to be admitted. In- 
deed, the resolutions reported by the Committee of Foreign 
Affairs make no pretension to admitting Texas, or any part of 
it, as a State. Nor do either of the pending amendments. They 
propose a mere acquisition of territory, and annihilate Texas as 
a State in the very act of annexation. But the whole history 
and context of the Constitution forbid such an interpretation of 
the power to admit new States, as the honorable member con- 
tends for. At the time of the formation of the Constitution 
there were large territories belonging to the States, or already 
ceded to the nation, out of which new States were to be formed. 
The Constitution itself was to go into effect whenever ratified 
by nine States, and there was no knowing how long the other 
four of the old thirteen might hold ofi'. These views are amply 
sufficient to fulfil the reasonable intent of the clause ofivins: 
authority to admit new States. More than that, a proposition 
was expressly negatived in the convention by which the Consti- 
tution was framed, by a vote of eight States to three, declaring 
that " the Legislature of the United States shall have power to 



THE ANNEXATION OF TEXAS. 449 

erect new States within as well as without the territory claimed 
by the several States, or either of them, and admit the same into 
the Union." And this was the very last vote before the adoption 
of the clause in its present form I 

An attempt has been made to derive an inference in favor of 
this proceeding from the articles of confederation, and to represent 
the power to admit new States into the Union as a mere exten- 
sion of the provision by which Canada and other colonies might 
have been admitted into the old confederacy. But no such infer- 
ence can be sustained for a moment by any one who looks to 
the contemporaneous construction of this clause of the Consti- 
tution by Mr. Madison, in the Federalist. 

"In the articles of Confederation (says he) no provision is found on this important 
subject. Canada was to be admitted of right, on her joining in tlic measures of the 
United States, and the other Colonies, by which were evidently meant, the otlier British 
Colonies, at the discretion of nine States. The eventual establishment of new States, 
seems to have been overlooked bv the compilers of that instrument. We have seen 
the inconvenience of this omission, and the assumption of power into which Congress 
have been led by it. With great propriety, therefore, has the new system supplied the 
defect. The general precaution, that no new States shall be formed, without the con- 
currence of the federal authority and that of the States concerned, is consonant to the 
principles which ought to govern such transactions. The particular precaution against 
the erection of new States, by the partition of a State without its consent, quiets the 
jealousy of the larger States ; as that of the smaller is quieted by a like precaution 
against a junction of States without their consent." 

Here, Sir, is the whole commentary on the power to admit 
new States, in the celebrated work by which the Constitution 
was explained and recommended to the people. How entirely 
it negatives the idea of any analogy between this article of the 
Constitution and the Canada clause of the confederation ! How 
distinctly it asserts the difference between admitting foreign colo- 
nies and admitting new States! How plainly it implies that 
the States to be admitted were to be literally new States, esta- 
blished on our own national territory, and under our own national 
authority I Who can believe for a moment, after reading it, that 
the admission of foreign States was within the most remote 
contemplation of those by whom the provision was framed ? 
How could Mr. Madison have omitted all allusion to such an 
idea, if, in his opinion, it were embraced within the legitimate 
construction of the clause! 

38* 



450 THE ANNEXATION OF TEXAS. 

Sir, there are other passages in Mr. Madison's masterly essays 
upon the Constitution, equally conclusive as to the understand- 
ing of the framers of the Constitution. We all know that one 
of the great objections arrayed against the establishment of our 
National Government in 1789, was drawn from the extent of 
country over which it was to operate. Not a few of the people 
of that day considered it impossible, that a republican system 
could be rendered effective, even throughout the whole of the 
territory which we then possessed. One of Mr. Madison's replies 
to this objection is full of significance in regard to the constitu- 
tional question which we are now considering. 

" A second observation to be made (says he) is. that the immediate object of the 
Federal Constitution, is to secure the union of the thirteen primitive States, which we 
know to be practicable : and to add to them sucli other States, as may arise in their 
own bosoms, or in their neighborhoods, which we cannot doubt to be equally practica- 
ble. The arrangements that may be necessary for those angles and fractions of our 
territoiy, which lie on our northwestern frontier, must be left to those whom further 
discoveries and experience will render more equal to the task." 

How irresistible is the inference from language like this ! The 
object of the Constitution is stated to be, to secure the union of 
the existing States, and to add to them such other States as may 
arise in their own bosoms, or in their neighborhoods ; while the 
only difficulty which is contemplated, is declared to be in rela- 
tion to " those angles and fractions of our temtory which lie on 
our northwestern frontier." 

There were compromises entered into, also, at the adoption of 
the Constitution, utterly inconsistent with a construction such as 
is now set up. The slave basis compromise, which has been so 
often alluded to of late, and which Massachusetts has been 
falsely accused of a design to violate, because she saw fit to 
exercise her constitutional prerogative of proposing an amend- 
ment to the Constitution, was arranged with unquestionable 
reference to our country as it then was. There was no Louis- 
iana then. There was no Florida then. The great Northwestern 
Territory had been dedicated to human liberty forever, by the 
immortal ordinance of 1787; an act which proved conclusively 
what our fathers understood by " an extension of the area of 
freedom." Slavery was nowhere regarded as a blessing; was 



THE ANNEXATION OF TEXAS. 451 

nowhere proclaimed (as it has recently been proclaimed by the 
Secretary of State, in the correspondence to which this subject 
has given occasion,) " a political institution, essential to the peace, 
safety, and prosperity of those States of the Union in which it 
exists." Its gradual extinction, on the other hand, was hopefully 
and confidently predicted. It was supposed that, as long as it 
continued, a great and growing preponderance would be secured 
to the free States, and the three fifths principle was admitted 
upon this understanding alone. This, at least, is my reading of 
the history of those times. 

Mr. Chairman, the Constitution of the United States ceases 
to be that Constitution to which the States have assented, both 
in relation to this and to others of its provisions, when its author- 
ity is thus extended beyond the original sphere for which it was 
designed. Tliat instrument is as essentially changed by a change 
of its parties, as by a change of its provisions, and the same power 
is alone competent to both. It is for the people alone, not by 
the equivocal expression of a Presidential election, but by the 
solemn forms prescribed by their own Constitution, to say, whe- 
ther they will admit new members into their copartnership, and 
upon what terms. Nay, I doubt whether even an amendment 
of the Constitution, ratified even by three fourths of the States, 
ought to be considered as forcing the other fourth to submit to 
a measure of this sort. The annexation of a foreign nation to 
this nation, or of this nation to a foreign nation, is a change of 
our country as well as a change of our Constitution. It is bring- 
ing us into association with those with whom we have never 
agreed to be associated. It is a new compact, into which each 
individual State ought to have, and has, the right of saying for 
itself whether it is willing to enter, as fully as each State had 
originally the right of saying whether it would enter into the 
compact which now binds us together. If ever there was a 
question which appealed directly to State rights, this is it ; and 
it will be a mockery to suggest the existence of any such rights 
from this time forth, if this measure can be consummated in 
defiance of them. Massachusetts is not accustomed to indulge 
in threats of disunion. They are the abundant products of 
other soils. She loves the Union. In her name I would say, 



452 THE ANNEXATION OF TEXAS. 

let the day perish in which it shall be said, "this Union is dis- 
solved ; " let it not be joined unto the days of the year ; let it not 
come into the number of the months I The lansfuaare of her 
excellent Governor, in a message received by this morning's mail, 
is the language of all her citizens. 

" Massaclmsetts as a State, has ever maintained, and ever will maintain, the whole 
of tlie Constitution of the United States. All her people love and respect it. Hard 
and unequal as she considers this feature of that honored instrument, she will bow to it 
with reverence so long as it remains the supreme law of the land. She regards all the 
guaranties of the Constitution, whether they relate to the institutions of the North or 
the South, as equally binding upon every member of the Union. She will stand by the 
Union and the Constitution as they were formed, let them be assailed from what quar- 
ter they may, and with inviolable fidelity perform all her obligations towards them." 

Massachusetts desires the establishment of no new confedera- 
tion. Her sons would go to the formation of another govern- 
ment, as the ancient Jews to the building of the second Temple, 
not without many tears at the remembrance of the first. But, 
Sir, the Union which they love, is the Union as it is. And if 
there be any thing which would shake that attachment, any thing 
which would absolve her and all the States from their owed 
allegiance to the Constitution, it is precisely such an act as is 
now before us. It may remain to be seen, after its consumma- 
tion, whether any of the States will claim the advantage of such 
an absolution. 

I come next, Mr. Chairman, to a consideration of the mode 
in which the annexation of Texas is now proposed to be accom- 
plished. The forms of free government have often been said to 
survive the substance ; and I trust that not a few of those who 
are willing to adopt this measure in the abstract, will refuse to 
unite for that purpose in any palpable infraction of constitutional 
forms. The resolution reported by the Committee on Foreign 
Affairs is, in my judgment, such an infraction; so palpable and 
so plain, that, as the venerable Gallatin has said in his letter of 
last month, " one may well fear to obscure that which is self-evi- 
dent, by adding any argument to the simple recital of the con- 
stitutional provision, and of the proposed resolution." 

Sir, if there be any thing clear from the distribution of powers 
contained in the Constitution, it is that this House has no author- 
ity whatever to make a treaty, compact, bargain, settlement, call 



THE ANNEXATION OF TEXAS. 458 

it what yea will, with a foreign power. This House may be, 
and often is, called on to carry out a treaty already made, by the 
appropriation of money or otherwise ; and gentlemen may differ 
as to how^ far w^e have any discretion in such cases, and how far 
our obligation is specific and positive to liiUil the provisions of 
a treaty. But, so far as the making of llie treaty is concerned, 
the whole power is with the President and Senate. " The 
President shall have power, by and with the advice and con- 
sent of the Senate, to make treaties, provided two thirds of the 
Senators present concur." This is the language of the Consti- 
tution. 

And what are treaties ? "A treaty," says Thomas Jefferson, 
in his manual, " is a law of the land. It differs from other laws 
only, as it must have the consent of a foreign nation, being but 
a contract wuth respect to that nation." 

" The essence of the legislative authority," says Alexander 
Hamilton in the Federalist, "is to enact laws, or, in other words, 
to prescribe rules for the regulation of the society ; while the 
execution of the laws, and the employment of the common 
strength, either for this purpose, or for the common defence, seem 
to comprise all the functions of the executive magistrate. The 
power of making treaties is, plainly, neither the one nor the other. 
It relates neither to the execution of the subsisting laws, nor to 
the enactment of new ones ; and still less to an exertion of the 
common strength. Its objects are contracts with foreign nations, 
which have the force of law, but derive it from the obligations 
of good faith. They are not rules prescribed by the sovereign 
to the subject, but agreements between sovereign and sovereign." 

Such is the constitutional provision, and such is its interpre- 
tation by the leaders of the two great parties to which the 
adoption of the Constitution gave rise. It is thus the Senate 
alone, the body in which the States have an equal suffrage, 
guaranteed to them forever, which can alone advise and consent 
to the ratification of any compact with a foreign nation ; and 
that body must do so by a two thirds vote, or not at all. The 
doctrine of the Constitution is, that one third of the States, 
though the smallest in the Union, if they can obtain a single 
vote from any other State, may forbid any alliance or compact 



454 THE ANNEXATION OF TEXAS. 



whatever with other governments. The doctrine of the Consti- 
tution is, also, that the functions of this House, and of the 
Legislative Congress of which it is a branch, begin and end 
with domestic legislation, and reach not one inch beyond our 
own established national boundaries. There is no other parti- 
tion line which can be drawn between the legislative power and 
the treaty-making power; and, if that line be once overthrown, 
all distinction between the two departments is at an end. Yet 
here we have before us the plain and undisguised proposition to 
enter into a compact with another nation; a compact which has 
already been submitted to the Senate as a treaty, and which 
has been rejected by them as such. The Chairman of the Com- 
mittee on Foreign Affairs has, indeed, erased the word treaty 
from his resolutions, and has substituted the word settlement. 
The honorable member from Ohio, too, in his amendment, has 
omitted the word settlement, and has substituted the parentheti- 
cal phrase " Texas consenting." But neither words, nor the omis- 
sion of words, can alter things. Nor can consent give jurisdic- 
tion. Both resolutions relate to lands, to laws, to property, to 
persons, out of our own territory; and both attempt to do that 
which cannot be done without the consent of another govern- 
ment. No man pretends that this is not a transaction to which 
there are two parties ; one of them, the United States of Ame- 
rica ; the other, an independent foreign nation. No man pre- 
tends that both these parties must not agree together, and make 
a compact or bargain, in order to render the transaction com- 
plete. The Chairman of Foreign Affairs has expressly said, in 
his opening speech : " As it is a bargain or contract with ano- 
ther country, it seems to me that an arrangement, carefully 
digested, with the agents of that country, authorized ad hoc, 
must be the best mode, if not the only one." This admission 
determines the whole question. It makes the transaction a 
treaty ; a treaty, it is true, anomalous in its character ; anni- 
hilating one of its parties ; transcending the powers of the 
other ; but still a treaty in form, a treaty if any thing. And it 
gives to these resolutions the character of a bold and unblush- 
ing attempt to break down the barriers of the Constitution by 
overthrowing the legitimate authority of the Senate. 



THE ANNEXATION OF TEXAS. 455 

And, Mr. Chairman, when the Senate of the United States is 
thus about to be desjioiled of its peculiar prerogative, for the 
accomplishment of this particular act, it may not be amiss to 
recall for a moment, in the language of one of the Fathers of 
the Constitution, the views with which that body was consti- 
tuted, and that prerogative conferred upon it. 

"A fifth desideratum, (said James Madison.) illustrating the utility of a Senate, is 
the want of a due sense of national character. An attention to the judgment of other 
nations, is important to every government, for two reasons . the one is, that, indcjicnd- 
cntly of the merits of any particular plan or measure, it is desirable, on various 
accounts, that it should appear to other nations as the offspring of a wise and honora- 
ble policy : the second is, that in doubtful cases, particularly where the national coun- 
cils may be warped by some strong passion, or momentary interest, the presumed or 
knowni opinion of the impartial world, may be the best guide that can be followed. 
"What has not America lost by her want of character with foreign nations ? And how 
many errors and follies would she not have avoided, if tlie justice and proprict}' of her 
measures had, in every instance, been previously tried by the light in which they would 
probably appear to the unbiased part of mankind." 

Again, says the same eminent statesman and patriot, in the 
same connection, — 

" As the cool and deliberate sense of the community ought, in all governments, and 
actually will, in all free governments, ultimately prevail over the views of its rulers: 
so there are particular moments in public affairs, when the people, stimulated by some 
irregular passion, or some illicit advantage, or misled by the artful misrepresentations 
of interested men, may call for measures which they themselves will afterwards be the 
most ready to lament and condemn. In these critical moments, how salutary will be 
the interference of some temperate and respectable body of citizens, in order to check 
the misguided career, and to suspend the blow meditated by the people against them- 
selves, until reason, justice, and truth can regain their authority over the public mind." 

Such were the views with w^hich the Senate of the United 
States was established, and such the views with which it was 
intrusted with the treaty-making power ; and if there were ever 
an occasion which illustrated the wisdom of this feature of the 
Constitution, and commended it to the respect and support of 
all good citizens, this, this is it. 

When was there ever exhibited a greater want of a due sense 
of national character, than in the course of this Texan negotia- 
tion ? When was there ever manifested a more wanton dispo- 
sition to defy the judgment of other nations, to outrage the opi- 
nion of the civilized world, and to shut the eyes to the light in 



456 THE ANNEXATION OF TEXAS. 

which the acts of this government must appear to the unbiased 
part of mankind, than in the means by which this measure has 
been pursued, and in the motives in which it avowedly origin- 
ated ? When were irregular passions, illicit advantages, and 
artful misrepresentations of interested men, more plainly at 
work than now, in stimulating the clamor with which the imme- 
diate annexation of Texas is demanded? When was the inter- 
vention of some conservative body more needed, until reason? 
justice, and truth can regain their authority over the public 
mind ? Sir, these passages have seemed to me to savor of an 
almost prophetic application to the service which the Senate 
are called on to discharge at the present crisis. Let me rather 
say, to the service which they have already and nobly dis- 
charged, and for which that body deserves other recompense, 
than to be so rudely stripped of its hitherto unquestioned con- 
stitutional prerogative! 

The honorable member from Alabama, (Mr. Belser,) denies, 
however, that this proceeding is any encroachment on the 
authority of the Senate, and has made an effort to produce some 
precedents of what he calls legislative treaties. One class of 
cases to which he referred was that of compacts with our own 
States for the cession of lands. Who can pretend that these 
are treaties? The whole idea of a treaty under our Constitu- 
tion, as I have already proved, is a compact with a foreign 
power. And the States of this Union have never been called 
foreign in relation to the General Government, or even foreign 
in relation to each other, unless in certain recent resolutions of 
South Carolina, of which possibly something may be heard 
from Massachusetts hereafter, but to which I shall make no 
allusion now. The General Government, I presume, may pur- 
chase lands of a State, as well as of any other corporation or 
individual, for constitutional purposes ; but such a purchase is 
no more a treaty in one case than in the other. 

The honorable member referred us next to a law of which he 
was particular in giving us the volume and page. (Laws of the 
United States, 3d volume, page 562.) Why, Sir, this is an act 
for taking possession of Louisiana, after the ratification of the 
treaty ! 



THte ANNEXATION OF TEXAS. 457 

His next illustration of legislative treaties was a resolution of 
15th January, 1811 — a resolution which was passed by both 
branches in secret session, and which was withheld from publi- 
cation for a long period after its passage. This resolution, Mr. 
Chairman, contains interesting and edifying matter, and with 
the leave of the Committee, I will read it. 

Resolution. 

Taking into view the pcculi:ir situation of Spain, and of her American provinces, 
and considering the influence which the destiny of the territory adjoining the Southern 
border of the United States may have upon their security, tranquillity, and commerce : 
therefore, 

" Resolved, hy the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of. 
America in Congress assembled, That the United States, under the peculiar circum- 
stances of the existing crisis, cannot, without serious inquietude, see any part of the 
said territory pass into the hands of any foreign power ; and that a due regard to their 
own safety compels them to provide, under certain contingencies, for the temporary 
occupation of the said territory ; they, at the same time, declare that the said territory 
shall, in their hands, remain subject to future negotiation." 

I am at a loss to perceive. Sir, in what part of this resolution 
any thing of the character of a treaty is to be found, legislative 
or otherwise. I am glad it has been alluded to, however, as it 
affords the best possible illustration of what the Congress of 
1811 understood by that law of necessity, that ri^ht of self- 
preservation, which has been so often appealed to in justifica- 
tion of the measure before us. The resolution provides only for 
a temporary occupation of the Florida territory, and, instead of 
setting Spain at defiance, expressly declares that the said terri- 
tory shall remain subject to future negotiation. 

But the honorable member from Alabama alluded, lastly, to 
cases of commercial regulation. These cases undoubtedly are 
somewhat peculiar in their character, but they are clearly dis- 
tinguishable from treaties. Congress, in the passage of such 
acts, undertakes to do nothing to which the consent of another 
government is necessary. We impose certain duties, for instance, 
or open certain ports, conditionally upon the action of foreign 
governments. We can impose the same duties, or open the 
same ports, without any such condition. We can make the 
same regulations, subject to any other condition of time or of 
circumstance, as well as subject to the legislation of a foreign 

39 



458 THE ANNEXATION OF TEXAS. 

government. The concurrent or reciprocal legislation of another 
nation is a nnere motive, in view of which we proceed to pass 
acts to which we are entirely competent of ourselves, which 
operate only within our own boundaries, and which the consent 
of no other party is necessary to complete. The whole doctrine 
of the distinction between the legislative and the treaty-making 
power, however, has been laid down by the present Secretary 
of State with so much precision and power, that I will detain 
the Committee no longer upon it myself, but will proceed to 
read some extracts of the speech of Mr. Calhoun on the com- 
mercial treaty with Great Britain, in the House of Representa- 
tives, January 8, 1816. (See Elliott's Debates, vol. iv. p. 273.) 

" He would estal)lish, he trusted, to the satisfaction of the House, that the treaty- 
malcing power, when it was legitimately exercised, always did that which could not be 
done by law." 

" Why cannot Congress make peace ? They have the power to make war. . . . 
Why cannot Congress, then, repeal the act making war ? He acknowledged, with the 
gentleman, they cannot consistently with reason. . . . The reason is plain ; one 
power may make war; it requires two to make peace. . . . It required a contract 
or a treaty between the nations at war. Is this peculiar to a treaty of peace? No ; 
it is common to all treaties. It arises out of their nature, and not from any incidental 
circumstance attaching itself to a particular class. It is no more nor less than that 
Congress cannot make a contract with a foreign nation. . . . Whenever, then, an 
ordinary subject of legislation can only be regulated by contract, it passes from the 
sphere of the ordinary power of making laws, and attaches itself to that of making 
treaties, wherever it is lodged. . . . Whatever, then, concerns our foreign rela- 
tions, whatever requires the consent of another nation, belongs to the treaty power ; 
can only be regulated by it; and it is competent to regulate all such subjects, provided 
— and here are its true limits — such regulations are not inconsistent with the Consti- 
tution. ... It has for its object, contracts with foreign nations ; as the powers of 
Congress have for their object whatever can be done in relation to the powers delegated 
to it without the consent of foreign nations. Each in its proper sphere operates with 
genial influence ; but when they become erratic, then they are portentous and danger- 
ous. A treaty never can legitimately do that Mhich can be done by law ; and the 
converse is also true. Suppose the discriminating duties repealed on both sides by 
law, yet what is effected by this treaty would not even then be done ; the plighted faith 
would be wanting. Either side might repeal its law without a breach of contract. It 
appeared to him that gentlemen arc too much influenced on this subject, by the exam- 
ple of Great Britain. Instead of looking to the nature of our government, they have 
been swayed in their opinion by the practice of that government, to which we are but 
too much in the habit of looking for j)recedents." 

But we are now told, Mr. Chairman, that Texas was once a 
part of our own territory, ceded to us by France in 1803 ; that 



THE ANNEXATION OF TEXAS. 459 

this is, therefore, no question of original annexation ; that we 
are only about to reclaim and reannex it. Sir, we have often 
heard of the magic power of words before now, but the question 
before us will be a lasting illustration of the mightier magic of 
syllables. There were two editions of a memorable letter to the 
people of Carroll county, Kentucky, published last Spring ; the 
first was a letter relative to the annexation of Texas ; the second 
was a letter relative to the re-annexation of Texas. They were 
published within a few weeks of each other, and prove how 
much importance is attached to this mono-syllabic after-thought. 
O, Sir, if the friends of this measure had exhibited half as much 
of the " suaviler in modo,^^ as they have of the '•'■forliter in re," 
it would have been better, far better for the honor of our country. 

But my hour is on the point of expiring, and I must leave all 
further remark upon the subject to another opportunity. I re- 
joice to believe that this is not the last time of asking in relation 
to this abhorrent union, and that we are not called on to declare 
our objections to it now, under the penalty of forever afterwards 
holding our peace. Meantime, circumstances may have changed 
before the measure is presented to us again. It may come 
before the country in a more constitutional shape. It may in- 
volve less danger of war. It may involve less encroachment on 
the rights of others. Objections of a temporary and formal 
character may have been removed. But I am unwilling to re- 
sume my seat without saying, that no such change of circum- 
stances will alter the case for me. I am against annexation, 
now and always — 

Because I believe it to be clearly unconstitutional in sub- 
stance ; 

Because I believe it will break up the balance of our system, 
violate the compromises of the Constitution, and endanger the 
permanence of our Union ; 

And, above all, because I am uncompromisingly opposed to 
the extension of Domestic Slavery, or to the addition of another 
inch of Slaveholding Territory to this Nation. 



GREAT BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES. 



A SPEECH DELIVERED IN THE HOUSE OF KEPliESENTATIVES OF THE UNI- 
TED STATES, FEBRUARY 1, 1845, — A BILL FOR THE ORGANIZATION OF A 
TERRITORIAL GOVERNMENT IN OREGON BEING UNDER CONSIDERATION, — 
IN THE COMMITTEE OF THE WHOLE ON THE STATE OF THE UNION. 



I TOOK the floor last evening, Mr. Chairman, as I stated when 
the Committee rose, with no view of preparing myself for any 
formal speech on the Oregon question. It may be remembered, 
that I addressed the House on that question at some length 
last year. The circumstances of the case have not materially 
changed since then, and my opinions in regard to it are alto- 
gether unaltered. I shall content myself, therefore, with a few 
remarks in reference to the precise bill under consideration, and 
with some observations in reply to gentlemen who have preceded 
me in the debate. 

I shall enter into no argument of the American title to the 
Oregon territory. No such argument, certainly, is needed to 
convince the members of this House of the justice of our claim 
to that territory. Whatever else we may differ about, we all 
seem to have a sufficient sense of the soundness of our own 
title. It seems to be forgotten, however, that it is Great Britain, 
and not the United States, which requires to be convinced on 
this point. If gentlemen would only undertake to satisfy Sir 
Robert Peel and Lord Aberdeen that the American title is en- 
tirely indisputable, and that the British pretension is altogether 
void and groundless ; or if they could fortify Mr. Calhoun in his 
efforts to enforce these positions upon the British minister with 
whom he is treating, they would turn their researches and their 
rhetoric to a more profitable account. I fear they are contribut- 



GREAT BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES. 461 

ing to no such result. I am inclined to believe that arguments, 
however strong, would lose much of their weight in the quarters 
I have suggested, when uttered in the tone of menace and defi- 
ance which has characterized so much of this debate. Nor can 
I forbear to say, that it appears to me extremely impolitic for us 
to be publicly engaged in any arguments on the subject, while 
negotiations in regard to it are actually on foot within ear-shot 
of this Hall, and while we are necessarily ignorant how far our 
own individual views may conform to those, which the Ameri- 
can Secretary of State may be at this moment pressing upon 
the attention of the British negotiator. 

Indeed, Sir, this whole proceeding is, in my judgment, emi- 
nently calculated to impede and embarrass the negotiations in 
which the two governments are employed. We have received 
authentic assurances that those negotiations have not yet failed, 
that they are still in progress, and that a communication in 
regard to them may be expected from the Executive before the 
close of the present session. Why not wait for this communi- 
cation ? Why insist on taking any step in the dark, when, in 
a few weeks at the most, we shall be able to act advisedly, and 
to see clearly the ground on which we are treading ? 

I cannot help thinking, Mr. Chairman, that the course pro- 
posed to be pursued on this subject, savors somewhat of distrust 
of the hands to which our side of this negotiation is committed. 
I know not that any such thing is intended. I know not that 
there is any purpose to influence, by this proceeding, the Cabinet 
arrangements of the President elect. It seems to me, however, 
that the peculiar friends of the present Secretary of State may 
well feel some little jealousy on the point. There is such a thing 
known to the Parliament of Great Britain as a vote of confi- 
dence in the ministry. The passage of this bill, taken in con- 
nection with the circumstances under which it will have been 
passed, and with the considerations by which it has been urged, 
will seem not a little like a vote of want of confidence in our 
American Secretary. I am no champion of Mr. Calhoun's. 
His Texan negotiations and correspondence have certainly not 
inspired me with the most enthusiastic admiration of his diplo- 
matic ability or tact. But it seems passing strange, I confess, 
39* 



462 GREAT BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES. 

that any of his friends should be willing to acquiesce in such 
marked imputations on his statesmanship and ministerial fidelity 
as have been heard on all sides of the House. " We cannot 
wait for negotiations. We want no more of them. They are 
sacrificing our territory. They are only another name for sur- 
renders of our rightful soil and sovereignty." These are the 
cries by which this measure is to be carried through ! Why, Sir, 
I should imagine, from all this, that we had some unprincipled 
or incompetent British Whig at the head of our Foreign affairs, 
ready to mart our territory for gold ; or that some such person 
was likely to succeed to the Department of State at the earliest 
moment. Such cries are the stale and unfounded reproaches 
with which political opponents have been wont to assail our 
public functionaries for party eflect. That they should now be 
heard from the self-styled Democracy of the House, while a 
Democratic Secretary of State has the great seals of the nation 
still in his hands, and while a fire-new Democratic administra- 
tion is on the very eve of accession, is, indeed, not a little extra- 
ordinary. 

No more negotiations ! Why, Sir, one would suppose that 
this would be the very time when a majority of this House 
would desire to have negotiations entered upon, and would feel 
a confidence that they would be conducted to a triumphant con- 
clusion. What have they to fear ? In the humiliating failure 
of all previous negotiations, they have the foil which is to give 
a greater brilliancy to their own success. If the treaty of Wash- 
ington was really so inglorious a surrender, pray, pray, Mr. Chair- 
man, do not forbid the abler, the more accomplished, the more 
patriotic negotiator of your own choice, present or future, to give 
us the example of a better treaty. Do not forbid him to retrieve 
the character of American diplomacy; to pluck up the drowning 
honor of the country from the waters of the St. John's ; and to 
show us, for all time to come, how to preserve, with a greater 
skill, at once the rights and the interests of the Republic, includ- 
ing that highest of all her interests. Peace ! 

No more negotiations ! The treaty of Washington an inglo- 
rious surrender ! To be sure, four fifths of the Senate ratified 
that treaty, and the whole country applauded it. But then 



GREAT BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES. 463 

Maine has never assented to it! So says one of the honorable 
members from Maine, (Mr. Hamlin.) Maine had her commis- 
sioners here, had she not, with full powers to agree upon a con- 
ventional line of boundary? and they did agree upon such a line. 
And Maine has since received into her treasury the money for 
which those commissioners stipulated, and for which the treaty 
provided. Not, Sir, the mere reimbursement of expenses in- 
curred in maintaining her supposed rights, as the honorable 
member implied, but the rated consideration for the lands to 
which she relinquished her claim. And yet the honorable mem- 
ber insists that Maine has never yet assented to the treaty ! This 
is an extraordinary position, certainly. I trust that it is not 
advanced now, as a pretence for repudiating the treaty, and for 
setting up a new claim to reamiexation, hereafter. How is the 
position sustained ? Simply by the allegation that the treaty 
was opposed by " the only Democratic Senator from Maine in 
the body by which the treaty was ratified." As if it were not 
an ample set-off to that suggestion, that the treaty was sup- 
ported by the only Whig Senator from Maine at the same 
period ; a gentleman (the Hon. George Evans) of whom I may 
say, without intending any disparagement to the Democratic 
Senator referred to, (the Hon. Reuel Williams, for whom I have 
a high personal esteem, founded upon a long acquaintance,) 
that he is second to none of his colleagues, past or present, nor, 
indeed, to any member of the body to which he belongs, in abi- 
lity, in patriotism, or in a just regard for the rights and the inter- 
ests, either of his own State or of the nation at large. 

No more negotiations ! Why, Mr. Chairman, where is such 
a doctrine as this to lead us ? Inevitably to war. To war with 
England now ; to war with all the world hereafter, or, certainly, 
with all parts of the world with which we may have controversies 
of any sort. And even war can never put an end to the neces- 
sity of negotiation. Unless war is to be perpetual, you must 
come back to negotiation in the end. The only question in the 
case before us — the only question in every case of disputed 
international rights — is, not whether you will negotiate or fight, 
but whether you will negotiate only, or negotiate and fight both. 
Battles will never settle boundaries between Great Britain and 



464 GREAT BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES. 

the United States, in Oregon, or elsewhere. The capture of 
ships, the destruction of commerce, the burning and plundering 
of cities, will leave us just where we commenced. First or last, 
negotiation alone can settle this question. For one, therefore, 
I am for negotiation first, before war, and without war. I believe 
that we shall get quite as much of Oregon in this way ; and I 
know that we shall get it at less expense, not merely of money, 
but of all that makes up the true welfare and honor of our 
country. 

Sir, the reckless flippancy with which war is spoken of in this 
House and elsewhere, as a thing to be " let come," rather than 
wait for the issue of negotiations, is deserving, in my judgment, 
of the severest rebuke and reprobation from every christian 
patriot and statesman. I say let it not come, let it never come, 
if any degree of honorable patience and forbearance will avert 
it. I protest against any course of proceeding which shall invite 
or facilitate its approach. I protest against it, in behalf of the 
commerce of the nation, so considerable a part of which I have 
the honor to represent. I protest against it, in the name of the 
public morality and religion, which ought to be represented by 
every member on this floor. I protest against it, also, in the 
spirit of a true Republican Democracy. My venerable colleague, 
(Mr. Adams,) alluded yesterday to the old and well-known cor- 
respondence of James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, under 
the signatures of Helvidius and Pacificus, and expressed his 
wish that it might be freshly read by all who took an interest in 
ascertaining the just limitations of executive power. I cordially 
respond to that sentiment. But I will venture to say that no 
one will read these letters without being struck with the force, 
the beauty, the consummate justness and truth of a warning 
against war, which one of those letters contains, and which con- 
stitutes the crown-jewel of the whole series. 

" War is, in fact,(say8 James Madison,) the true nurse of Executive aggrandizement. 
In war a physical force is to be created, and it is the Executive will which is to direct 
it. In war the public treasures are to be unlocked, and it is the Executive hand which 
is to dispense them. In war tlic honors and emoluments of office are to be multiplied, 
and it is the Executive patronage under which tlicy are to be enjoyed. It is in war, 
finally, that laurels are to be gathered, and it is the Executive brow they are to encir- 
cle. The strongest passions and most dangerous weaknesses of the human breast, — 



GREAT BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES. 465 

ambition, avarice, vanity, the honorable or venial love of fame, are all in conspiracy 
against the desire and the duty of peace. 

Hence it has grown into an axiom, that the Executive is the department of power 
most distinguished by its propensity to war ; hence it is the practice of all States, in 
proportion as they are free, to disarm this propensity of its influence." 

Such is the noble testimony which was borne by one of the 
fathers of our country, half a century ago, to the anti-Republican 
tendencies of war. And it is of this " true nurse of Executive 
aggrandizement," that gentlemen, who are pluming themselves 
upon their exclusive democracy, are so continually crying — let 
it come ! Such a cry, Mr. Chairman, is not only inconsistent 
with sound Republicanism and true morality, but it is to the 
last degree puerile. I intend no disrespect to any gentleman 
who hears me ; but as I have listened to the heroic strains which 
have resounded through this hall for some days past, in reference 
to the facility with which we could muster our fleets in the 
Pacific, and march our armies over the- Rocky Mountains, and 
whip Gteat Britain into a willingness to abandon her pretensions 
to Oregon, I have wished that some Philip Faulconbridge were 
here to reply, as he does in Shakspeare's King John, to some 
swaggering citizen of Anglers, — 

" Here 's a large mouth, indeed, 



That spits forth death , and mountains, rocks, and seas ! 

Talks as familiarly of roaring lions, 

As maids of thirteen do of puppy-dogs ! 

He speaks plain cannon, fire and smoke, and bounce." 

This is certainly no bad description of much of the debate to 
which this bill has given occasion, and which might better have 
befitted the dramatic stage than the council-halls of 'a civilized 
nation. 

And against whom are all these gasconading bravadoes in- 
dulged ? What nation has been thus bethumped and bastinadoed 
with brave words ! I have no compliments to bestow on Great 
Britain, and am not here as her apologist or defender. But this, 
at least, I can say, without fear of imputation or impugnment, 
that, of all the nations of the world, she is that nation which is 
able to do us the most good in peace, and the most harm in war. 
She is that nation with whom the best interests of our country 



466 GREAT BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES. 

imperatively demand of us to go along harmoniously, so long as 
we can do so without a sacrifice of unquestioned right and 
honor. She is that nation, a belligerent conflict with whom, 
would put back the cause of human civilization and improve- 
ment more than it has advanced in half a century past, or would 
recover in half a century to come. Peace between Great Britain 
and the United States is not a mere interest of the two countries. 
It is an interest of the world, of civilization, of humanity ; and 
a fearful reckoning will be theirs who shall wantonly disturb it. 

In this view, Mr. Chairman, I cannot help deploring the prin- 
ciple of hatred towards England, which seems to have been 
recently inscribed, by not a few of our public men, as the first 
article of their political creed. There are those with whom a 
fling at Great Britain appears to be the principal study of all 
their oratory, and who seem to regard no argument complete, 
which does not contain some denunciation of her grasping policy 
or her spurious philanthropy. They seem to have adopted, in 
reference to England, the maxim which Lord Nelson i^ related 
to have inculcated towards France, in his advice to some of the 
midshipmen under his command — " There are three things (said 
he) which you are constantly to bear in mind : first, you must 
always implicitly obey orders, without attempting to form any 
opinion of your own respecting their propriety ; secondly, you 
must consider every man your enemy who speaks ill of your 
King ; and thirdly, you must hate a Frenchman as you hate the 
devil." Such a maxim might be pardoned, perhaps, to soldiers 
and sailors, on the eve of an engagement in mortal combat with 
their foes ; but it is the last which ought to be entertained by 
those who are intrusted with the power and the duty of pacific 
legislation. 

But then Great Britain is so insolent and so aggressive, that 
we cannot help hating her. She is hemming us round on every 
side, the honorable member from Illinois tells us, and we must 
make a stand against her soon, or we shall be absolutely over- 
run I — Mr. Chairman, this phrase, that Great Britain is hemming 
us in on every side, has become so great a favorite of late years 
in our political dialectics, that I am disposed to inquire, before it 
is irrevocably incorporated into our dictionary of truisms, how 
fax it is as exact as it is elegant. 



GREAT BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES. 46T 

"Great Britain is hemming us in on every side, and already 
has us inclosed in her network on our own continent;" this, I 
think, was the declaration of the honorable member from Illi- 
nois. How far, sir, will such a declaration bear the light of his- 
torical truth ? It would seem to imply, that the United States 
of America was the original civilized nation established on this 
continent; that Great Britain had subsequently made settle- 
ments in our neighborhood; and that she had systematically 
proceeded to environ us on all sides with her colonial posses- 
sions and military posts. This is certainly a new reading of 
American history. I have some how or other obtained an im- 
pression from the schools, that Great Britain once possessed 
almost the whole of this continent, or, at any rate, a very much 
larger part of it than she now enjoys. I have an indistinct idea, 
that there was a day when she held dominion over almost all 
the territories in which we now rejoice. I have some dreamy 
recollection of having read or heard about stamp acts, and tea 
taxes, and Boston port-bills ; about Bunker hills, and Saratogas, 
and Yorktowns ; about revolutions, and declarations, and treaties 
of Independence. And it is still my belief, Mr. Chairman, which 
fire will not burn out of me, that, by some means or other, 
Great Britain has been deprived, within the last seventy years, 
of by far her most valuable colonies on this continent ; that 
there has been a great deal more of ripping, than hemming, as 
to this network of hers ; that, instead of her hemming us in, 
we have thrust her out, and have left her a comparatively, if not 
a really, insignificant power in this Western Hemisphere ! 

Sir, Great Britain has not acquired one foot of soil upon this 
continent, except in the way of honorable treaty with our own 
government, since the day on which we finally ousted her from 
her old dominion within the limits of our Republican Union. 
Every body knows that she acquired Canada by the treaty of 
1763. We ourselves helped her to that acquisition. Not a few 
of the forces — not a few of the leaders, by which our own inde- 
pendence was achieved, were trained up, as by a Providential 
preparation, for the noble duty which awaited them, in the war 
which resulted in the cession of Canada to Great Britain. Cer- 
tainly, then, we have no cause of quarrel with Great Britain 



468 GREAT BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES. 

that Canada is hers. Bat then, she has dared to think about 
Texas, she has cast some very suspicious glances at Cuba, and 
there is great reason to apprehend that her heart is at this moment 
upon California I True, she has formally denied, to our own 
government, that she has any desire to see Texas other than an 
independent nation. True, she once conquered Cuba, and gave 
it back again to Spain by the treaty of 1763. True, she has 
given no outward and visible sign of any passionate yearning 
for the further dismemberment of Mexico. But who trusts to 
diplomatic assurances ? Who confides in innocent appearances ? 
Diplomatic assurances I Has not the chairman of our own 
Committee of Foreign Affairs warned us, that, " like the oaths 
which formerly accompanied treaties, they have been the cheap 
contrivances of premeditated hostile action ? " Has he not 
warned us especially, against the diplomatic assurance of Great 
Britain in regard to Texas, as " the ordinary harbinger of what- 
ever it most solemnly denies ? " 

Such a course of argument as this, Mr. Chairman, is certainly 
in one respect entirely conclusive. There is, obviously, no mode 
of replying to it. Once assume the position, that neither the 
words nor the deeds of Great Britain are to be taken in evidence 
of her designs, but that her assurances are all hollow, and her 
acts air hypocritical, and there is no measure of aggression and 
outrage which you may not justly apprehend from her. I do 
not believe, however, that any considerable part of this House? 
or of this country, will acquiesce in the propriety of proceeding 
upon premises which involve imputations so gross and so gratui- 
tous. And once again I ask, where is the proof of these alarm- 
ing and aggressive purposes of Great Britain, so far as our own 
continent is concerned ? Where is the evidence that she is 
inclosing us in a fatal network, and hemming us in on every 
side ? Nay, sir, I boldly put the question to the consciences of 
all who hear me — of which of the two countries. Great Britain 
or the United States, will impartial history record, that it mani- 
fested a spirit of impatient and insatiate self-aggrandizement 
on this North American continent ? How does the record stand, 
as already made up ? If Great Britain has been thinking of 
Texas, we have acquired Louisiana; if Great Britain has been 



GREAT BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES. 469 

looking after Cuba, we have established ourselves in Florida ; if 
Great Britain has set her heart on California, we have put our 
hand upon Texas. Reproach Great Britain, if you please, with 
the policy she has pursued in extending her dominions else- 
where. Reprobate, if you please, her course of aggression upon 
the East Indian tribes ; and do not forget to include your own 
Indian policy in the same commination. But let us hear no 
more of her encroaching spirit in this quarter. It is upon our- 
selves, and not upon her, that such a spirit may be fairly charged. 
I say to the gentleman from Illinois, as one of the peculiar 
friends of reannexing Texas, and reoccupying the whole of Ore- 
gon, miitato nomine, de te fahula narratnr. 

Indeed, Mr. Chairman, the story has been told of us already. 
We have been anticipated in all these imputations of an un- 
scrupulous spirit of aggrandizement. I have here a speech by 
Mr. Huskisson — a name held in peculiar reverence by the 
friends of free trade in this House, and entitled to the respectful 
regard of us all, both for the intellectual ability and the moral 
excellence with which it was long associated — delivered in the 
British House of Commons in 1830, on the political and com- 
mercial relations of Great Britain and Mexico. The speech is 
full of interesting and curious matter, and I doubt not that I 
shall be indulged in reading some passages from it to the House. 

" But, Sir, if there are great political interests which should induce us to endeavor 
to maintain to Spain her present sovereignty and possession of Cuba and Porto Eico, 
there are other political considerations which make it not less important — if possible, 
still more important — that Mexico should settle into a state of internal peace and tran- 
quillity, and of entire and secure independence. If the United States have declared 
that they cannot allow the island of Cuba to belong to any maritime power in Europe, 
Spain excepted, neither can England, as the first of those maritime powers — I say it 
fearlessly, because I feel it strongly — suffer the United States to bring under their 
dominion a greater portion of the shores of the Gulf of Mexico, than that which they 
now possess." 

This, Mr. Chairman, be it remembered, was a public declara- 
tion on the floor of the House of Commons, in the year 1830, 
by one of the most leading and influential British statesmen of 
that day. And I cannot help remarking, before I read on, that 
it appears to have produced not the slightest sensation on this 
side of the water. General Jackson was then President of the 
40 



470 GREAT BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES. 

United States. Mr. Van Buren was then Secretary of State, 
and was drafting, in that capacity, those memorable instructions 
which afterwards cost him his recall from London; instructions, 
by which the attention of the British Government was invited 
to the peculiar relations of amity existing, not between Great 
Britain and the United States, but between Great Britain and 
the Democratic Administration which had just succeeded to 
power. This peculiar friendship of General Jackson and his 
friends towards Great Britain, was in no degree disturbed, it 
seems, by the distinct declaration that we should not be suffered 
to annex Texas. There was no outcry against British interfer- 
ence or British aggression. There was no clamor about her 
designs to effect the abolition of Southern slavery. No, Sir, the 
abolition movements of Great Britain had not then been com- 
menced in her own colonies. And a most notable circumstance 
it is, that the disposition of Great Britain to prevent the annex- 
ation of Texas to this country, should have been so clearly mani- 
fested, before she had made the slightest demonstration of an 
anti-slavery spirit. It puts an utterly extinguishing negative 
upon the charge, that her opposition is the mere result of her 
designs upon American slavery. But let me proceed with the 
speech of Mr. Huskisson. 

" Within the last twenty-seven years they have become masters of all the shores of 
that Gulf, from the point of Tlorlda to the river Sabine, including the mouths of the 
Mississippi, and of other great rivers, the port of New Orleans, and the valuable and 
secure harbors of Florida; and, within these few days, we hear of their intention of 
forming a naval station and arsenal at the islands of the Dry Toi'tugas, a commanding 
position in the Gulf stream between Florida and Cuba. With all this extent of coast 
and islands, we know, further, that designs are entertained, and daily acted upon— I 
will not say by the present Government of the United States, but, notoriously, by the 
people — to get possession of the fertile and extensive Mexican province of Texas. 
To borrow an expression of a deceased statesman of that country, ' the whole people 
of America have their eye' upon that province. They look to all the country between 
the river Sabine and the river Bravo del Norte, as a territory that must, ere long, belong 
to their Union. They have, also, I believe, that same eye upon some of the western 
coast of Mexico, possessing valuable ports in the Gulf of California. Should they 
obtain these districts, the independence of INIexico, I will venture to say, will be no 
better, or more secure, than that of the Creek Indians, or any other Indian tribe now 
living within the circle of the present recognized limits of the United States ; and the 
Gulf of Mexico will become as much a part of their waters as the Black ScaAvas once 
of the waters of Turkey, or as the channel which separates England from Ireland may 
be considered as part of the waters of the United Kingdom. 



GREAT BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES. 471 

" I may be told, Sir, that these are visionary alarms, contemplating schemes of 
aggrandizement and ambition wliich never have been, and probably never will be, 
entertained in any quarter At this moment, I willingly admit that there exists a 
friendly disposition in the Government of the United States, and I cannot doubt that 
his Majesty's Government fully reciprocates that disposition. Upon every account, I 
am glad to see these two powerful States living upon terms of honorable and mutual 
confidence, each relying upon the peaceful councils of the other. But it is not to be 
imputed to me that I am undervaluing this good understanding, or that I am guilty of 
want of respect to the United States, or even of discretion as an individual member of 
Parliament, if, on this occasion, I do not lose sight of those circumstances of a perma- 
nent nature which belong to the fixed policy of the United States, and to those motives 
of action which, however dormant at present, would probably be revived, under con- 
tingencies that, in the course of events, may hereafter arise — contingencies, which the 
views and passions of the American people would not fail to turn to account for the 
attainment of a long cherished and favorite object. 

" At all periods of our history, the House of Commons has held topics of this nature 
to be fair grounds of parliamentary consideration. Jealousj', for instance, of the 
aggrandizement of the house of Bourbon, has always been held an element entitled to 
enter into every general discussion afl'ecting the balance of power in Europe, and I am 
sure there is nothing in the general character of Democratic Eepublics or in the past 
conduct of the United States, from which we can infer, that their aspirations after 
power and aggrandizement are less steadily kept in view than those of an absolute 
monarch in Europe. In looking to the future, let us consult the experience of the past. 
But, in the case of the New World, we have something more than the history of the 
last thirty years to guide our judgment. The views and sentiments of those who, 
during that period, have directed or influenced the affairs of the United States, have 
been brought before us by the publication of their correspondence. I am afraid the 
living statesmen of this country have scarcely had time to made themselves acquainted 
with those views and sentiments, as they stand disclosed in the memoirs and correspond- 
ence of a deceased statesman of America, I mean the late Mr. Jefferson, a man who, 
from the period of their first declaration of independence — a declaration of which he 
was the author — to the close of his life, seems to have possessed the greatest ascend- 
ency in the councils of his country, and whose avowed principles and views appear to 
become every day more predominant in the public feelings of his countrymen. 

" In respect to the Gulf of Mexico, and the immense interests, commercial, colonial, 
and maritime, which are closely connected with the navigation of that Gulf, these 
memoirs are full of instruction — I might say, of admonitions — well deserving the 
most serious attention of the people of this country. I will not trouble the House with 
any long extracts from them ; but I cannot deny myself the opportunity of pointing 
their attention to a few passages, which show how soon the United States, after they 
became a separate nation, fixed their eye upon the Gulf of Mexico, and how steadily 
and successfully they have watched and seized every opportunity to acquire dominion 
and ascendency in that part of the world. Within seven years after the time when 
their independence had been established, and finally recognized in 1783, we find them 
setting up a claim of positive right to the free navigation of the Mississippi, from its 
source to the Gulf of Mexico ; and it is not a little curious to see what was the oppor- 
tunity they took of asserting this right against Spain, a power which had materially 
assisted them in obtaining their independence. In the year 1790, it will be recollected 
that a dispute had arisen between England and Spain respecting Nootl^a Sound. 



472 GREAT BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES. 

Whilst these two countries were arming, and every thing appeared to threaten war 
between them, the United States thought that they saw, in the embarrassments of Spain, 
an opening to claim this navigation as of right. Whether such a chiim could or could 
not be sustained by any principle of the law of nations, is a question which I will not 
stop to examine. The affirmative was at once boldly assumed by America, and her 
demand proceeded upon that assumption. The right once so affirmed, what does the 
House think was the corollary which the Government of the United States built upon 
their assertion of that supposed right "? I will give it in the words of Mr. Jcfterson 
himself, not a private individual, but the Secretary of State, conveying the instructions 
of his Government to Mr. Carmichael, then the American envoy at Madrid:—' You 
know,' writes Mr. Jefferson, ' that the navigation cannot be practised without a port, 
where the sea and river vessels may meet and exchange loads, and where those em- 
ployed about them may be safe and unmolested. The right to use a thing compre- 
hends a right to the means necessary to its use, and without which it would be useless.' 
I know not what the expounders of the law of nations in the old world Avill have to 
say to this novel and startling doctrine. In this instruction, which is dated the 2d of 
August, 1790, the principle is only laid down in the abstract. 

" I will now show the House the special application of it to the claim in question, by 
quoting another letter from Mr. Jefferson to Mr. Short, the American envoy at Paris, 
dated only eight days after the former, namely, the 10th of August. It is as follows '• 
' The idea of ceding the island of New Orleans could not be hazarded to Spain in the 
first step ; it would be too disagreeable at first view ; because this island, with its town, 
constitutes, at present, their principal settlement in that part of their dominions, (Lou- 
isiana,) containing about three thousand white inhabitants, of every age and sex. Rea- 
son and events, however, may, by little and little, familiarize them to it. That we have 
a right to some spot as an entrepot for our commerce may be at once affirmed. I sup- 
pose this idea (the cession of New Orleans) too much even for the Count de Montmorin 
at first, and that, therefore, you will find it prudent to urge, and get him to recommend 
to the Spanish court, only in general terms, a port near the mouth of the river, with a 
circumjacent territory sufficient for its support, well defined, and extra-territorial to 
Spain, leaving the idea to future growth.' 

" Contrary to the expectation of the United States when those instructions were 
given. Great Britain and Spain settled their differences without an appeal to arms; 
and, in consequence, these practical applications of the law of nations were no longer 
pressed by the United States. Soon after, Spain became involved in war with France, 
and that war terminated in her being compelled to cede Louisiana to the latter power. 
In 180.3, that whole ])rovince was sold by France to the United States. By this pur- 
chase they acquired not only New Orleans, but a very extensive territory within the 
Gulf of Mexico. I next go to the year 1806. Mr. Jefferson was then no longer Secre- 
tary of State ; he had been raised to the more imjiortant post of President of the 
United States. In that character we find him writing to j\Ir. Monroe, then the Ame- 
rican minister in London, in the following terms: ' We begin to broach the idea, that 
we consider the whole Gulf stream as of our own waters, in which hostilities and 
cruising are to be frowned on for the present, and prohiliitcd so soon as either consent 
or force will permit us.' The letter, from which this is an extract, is dated the 4th of 
May, 1806. 

" If the United States ' broached ' this idea in 1806, they are not likely to have aban- 
doned it in 1819, when, in addition to Louisiana, they procured, by treaty with Spain, 
the further important cession of the Floridas. That it is a growing rather than a 



GREAT BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES. 473 

waning principle of their policy, I think we ma)- infer from a later letter which we find 
in this correspondence, not written, indeed, by Mr. Jefferson in any public character, 
but addressed by him, as a person exercising from his retirement the greatest sway in 
the councils of the Union, to the President. This letter, dated so lately as the 25th of 
October, 1823, discusses the interests of the United States in respect to Cuba and the 
Gulf of Mexico, and these are the statements which it avows: 'I candidly confess that 
I have ever looked on Cuba as the most interesting addition which could ever be made 
to our system of States. The control which, with Florida Point, this island would give 
us over the Gulf of Mexico, and the countries and isthmus bordering on it, as well as 
all those whose waters flow into it, would fill up the measure of our political well- 
bein"-. Yet I am sensible this can never be obtained, even with her own consent, but 
by war.' " 

These extracts from the speech of Mr. Huskisson, in 1830, 
Mr. Chairman, are at once amusing and edifying. I think no 
one can help smiling at the ingenious devices of Mr. Jefferson, 
which they disclose, for extending our dominion over sea and 
land. They prove, too, most abundantly, (and it was for this 
purpose that I have introduced them,) that all the charges 
against Great Britain, which we are now making, as to her 
designs upon Texas, upon California, and upon Cuba, are but 
the flattest repetition of those which Great Britain long ago 
arrayed against us. They prove, still further, as I have already 
intimated, that the jealousy of Great Britain as to the extension 
of our dominion over the Gulf of Mexico, was long antecedent 
to any movement on her part on the subject of slavery, and 
utterly demolish the position that her desire to maintain the 
independence of Texas is the mere result of spurious philan- 
thropy and abolition fanaticism. But I leave them to speak for 
themselves, and turn to considerations more immediately con- 
nected with the question before us. 

The honorable member from Illinois (Mr. Douglas) seemed 
greatly excited yesterday at a remark which fell from my friend 
from Pennsylvania, (Mr. E. J. Morris,) in reference to the ulti- 
mate destiny of the Oregon Territory, and to the likelihood of 
its becoming the site of an independent nation, instead of re- 
maining as a permanent member of our own confederacy. The 
honorable member chafed himself into a state of most towering 
indignation at the bare suggestion of such an idea, and de- 
nounced it in the most unsparing terms as an almost treason- 
able proposition for dissolving the Union. He invoked the atten- 

40* 



474 GREAT BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES. 

tion of the whole country to this first intimation of a design to 
dismember our Republic, and demanded a prompt expression of 
rebuke and condemnation upon all who were privy to so mon- 
strous and revolting a proposition. Pray, Sir, does the honor- 
able member know with whom this idea originated, or by whom, 
certainly, it was most deliberately and emphatically uttered in 
this Capitol ? Let me beg his attention to a passage from the 
speech of an honorable Senator from Missouri, who, I hope, has 
lost nothing of the confidence of his own party by a course of 
proceeding in regard to the annexation of Texas, by which he 
has gained the respect of not a few of his political opponents, 
and has literally " overcome more than his enemies." 

" Mr. Benton proceeded to the next inquiry — the effect which the occupation of the 
Cohimbia would have upon this Union. 

" On this point he could speak for himself only, but he could speak without reserve. 
He believed that the union of these States would not be jeoparded by the occupation 
of that river, but that it would be the means of planting the germ of a new and inde- 
pendent power beyond the Rocky JMountains. There was a beginning and a natural 
progress in the order of all things. The military post on the Columbia would be the 
nucleus of a settlement. Tarmers, traders, and artisans, would collect about it. 
When arrived at some degree of strength and population, the young society would 
sicken of a military government, and sigh for the establishment of a civil authority. 
A territorial government obtained, the full enjoyment of State rights would next be 
demanded ; and, these acquired, loud clamors would soon be heard against the hard- 
ship of coming so far to the Seat of Government. All this would be in the regular 
order of events, and the consequence should be foreseen and j^rovided for. This 
Republic should have limits. The present occasion does not require me to say where 
these limits should be found on the North and South ; but they are fixed by the hand 
of nature, and posterity will neither lack sense to see, nor resolution to step up to 
them. Westward, we can speak without reserve; and the ridge of the Rocky Moun- 
tains may be named without offence, as presenting a convenient, natural and everlast- 
ing boundary. Along the back of this ridge, the western limit of this republic should 
be drawn, and the statue of the fabled god, Terminus, should be raised upon its high- 
est peak, never to be thrown down. In planting the seed of a new power on the coast 
of the Pacific ocean, it should be well understood that, when strong enough to take 
care of itself, the new government should separate from the mother empire, as the 
child separates from the parent at the age of manhood. The heights of the Rocky 
Mountains should divide their possessions ; and the mother Republic would find her- 
self indemnified for her cares and expense about the infant jiower, in the use of a post 
in the Pacific ocean ; the protection of her interests in that sea ; the enjoyment of the 
fur trade ; the control of the Indians ; the exclusion of a monarchy from her border , 
the frustration of the hostile schemes of Great Britain ; and, above all, in the erection 
of a ncv/ Republic, composed of her children, speaking her language, inheriting her 
principles, devoted to liberty and equality, and ready to stand by her side against the 
combined powers of the old world." 



GREAT BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES. 475 

Such, Mr. Chairman, were the views of Mr. Benton, in 1825. 
Here is the earliest public expression of the idea, which has so 
electrified with horror the honorable member from Illinois, and 
which has drawn forth the heaviest bolts of his indignation. 

" ! many a shaft, at random sent, 
Finds mark the archer little meant ! " 

His fulminations, it is plain, have passed quite over the heads 
of his opponents, and have fallen upon one whom, of all others, 
he would most gladly have spared. 

Nor is Mr. Benton the only one of the honorable member's 
Democratic exemplars whom he has unconsciously scathed. A 
most respectable and intelligent friend of mine (Mr. T. G. Cary, 
of Boston,) visited Monticello in 1818. Mr. Jefferson was then 
greatly interested in the subject of Western emigration, and in 
the reports of Lewis and Clarke. In the course of conversation 
he inquired whether, when Mr. Astor sold out Astoria to the 
British Fur Company, he retained a right to property of any 
kind there. " Because," said he, " I am anxious to ascertain that 
there was some reservation on which a territorial claim may 
be made. I am desirous of seeing a new confederation growing 
up there." " You say a new confederation, (replied my friend;) 
you mean a distinct one, then." " Certainly," said Mr. Jeffer- 
son, " the extent would be altogether too great for one govern- 
ment." 

The same view was expressed by Mr. Jefferson in a letter to 
Mr. Astor, which has been referred to by another highly intelli- 
gent and distinguished Boston merchant, (Hon. William Stur- 
gis,) in a very able lecture upon the Oregon question, delivered 
before the Boston JMercantile Library Association, a few days 
since. In that letter, Mr. JefTerson says, — 

" I considered as a great public acquisition the commencement of a settlement on 
that point of the Western coast of America, and looked forward with gratification to 
the time, when its descendants should have spread themselves through the whole 
length of that coast, covering it with free and independent Americans, unconnected 
•with us but by the ties of blood and interest, and enjoying like us the rights of self- 
government." 

These are antiquated opinions, I shall be told, which the 
young Democracy cannot recognize. Railroads and steam en- 



476 GREAT BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES. 

gines have annihilated space, and have exploded all theories 
which rested on the accidents of extent and distance. But 
what, Mr. Chairman, becomes of that argument, of which we 
have heard so much in the late debate upon Texas, about natu- 
ral boundaries, and " the configuration of the earth ? " It is not 
a little amusing to observe what different views are taken as to 
the indications of " the hand of nature," and the pointings of 
" the finger of God," by the same gentlemen, under difTerent cir- 
cumstances and upon different subjects. In one quarter of the 
compass they can descry the hand of nature in a level desert 
and a second-rate river, plainly defining our legitimate bounda- 
ries and beckoning us impatiently to march up to them. But 
when they turn their eyes to another part of the horizon, the 
loftiest mountains of the universe are quite lost upon their gaze. 
There is no hand of nature there. The configuration of the 
earth has no longer any significance. The Rocky Mountains 
are mere molehills. Our destiny is onward. We must cover 
this whole continent — ay, and go beyond it, if necessary, says 
the honorable member from Illinois. And all for the glory of 
the Republic! " The finger of God " never points in a direction 
contrary to the extension of the glory of the Republic I This 
would seem to be the sum and upshot of the whole matter. 
Sir, there is a definition of glory by the immortal dramatist 
whom I have already quoted, which such a course of remark 
has brought to my remembrance, and which I cannot forbear 

citing. 

" Glory is like a circle in the water, 
AVliich never ceaseth to enlarge itself, 
'Till, by broad spreading, it disperse to nought-"' 

And this, this, will be the glory of that spirit of aggrandize- 
ment which is seen, at this moment, leaping over the Sabine in 
one quarter, and dashing itself upon the Rocky mountains in 
another! 

A few words in reference to the precise bill before us, Mr. 
Chairman, will bring me to a close. 

I listened. Sir, with great pleasure, to the remarks of the 
Chairman of the Committee by which this bill was introduced, 
(Mr. A. V. Brown,) who closed the debate last evening. If the 



GREAT BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES. 477 

whole discussion had been conducted in the same tone and 
temper in which he addressed the House, and if the bill had 
been originally drafted in the shape to which he has expressed 
his willingness now to reduce it, there would have been little 
cause for regretting the introduction of the subject. I agree 
with him in his two principal positions. I concur with him, 
first, in the opinion, that it is inexpedient for us to terminate the 
convention of joint occupation until negotiations have been still 
longer pursued. I agree with him, also, that it is perfectly con- 
sistent with the existence of that convention for us to extend 
our jurisdiction over our own citizens, just so far as Great 
Britain has extended her jurisdiction over her own subjects, in 
the Oregon Territory ; and, so far, I am willing to go with him. 

But I am of opinion that the bill under consideration, even 
with the amendments which have been proposed, goes far be- 
yond this mark. The section which provides for the granting of 
lands to settlers, with whatever limitations and qualifications it 
may be guarded, will be considered as an assumption of exclu- 
sive sovereignty, or, as an indirect mode of securing an exclu- 
sive advantage. The British Government will so construe it. 
And how will our Secretary of State be able to gainsay such a 
construction, when he has already admitted the justice with 
which it would be set up, in a speech of his own in the Senate 
of the United States within eighteen months past, as printed in 
the Congressional Globe before me ? I need not trouble the 
committee with citations. Any gentleman can turn to the 
speech for himself. But is it not worth while for the friends of 
Mr. Calhoun to pause, before they place him in a predicament, 
in which the only alternatives will be, either to resign his post, 
or to defend a course of proceeding, as Secretary, which he has 
openly condemned as a Senator ? 

Even as a measure for the American settlers in Oregon, with- 
out regard to the claims of Great Britain, this bill is not alto- 
gether to my taste. It provides for the appointment of a go- 
vernor and judge, who are to have absolute authority to promul- 
gate and enforce throughout the Territory of Oregon, any and 
all laws which they may see fit to select from the statutes of 
any State or Territory in the Union ; which laws are to con- 



478 GREAT BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES. 

tinue in force until positively disapproved of by Congress a 

limitation which we all know, from our experience in regard to 
other Territories, is practically inoperative. This discretionary 
dominion of these two officers is to last until there shall be five 
thousand free white male American citizens of twenty-one 
years of age in Oregon to authorize the establishment of a 
legislative body for themselves. This wall be no brief term for 
such a Duarchy. The tide of emigration is now setting towards 
California, and not towards Oregon. There has been a great 
deal of delusion as to the prospect of an early colonization of 
Oregon. It is now pretty well understood that there are as 
good lands on this side of the Rocky Mountains as on the other, 
so far, at least, as the country north of the 42d degree of lati- 
tude is concerned. The day is still distant, when there will be 
five thousand free white male American citizens in Oregon. I 
am told that there are not two thousand there now. And I do 
not believe that these American citizens will thank you for 
breaking up the little temporary organization upon which they 
have agreed among themselves, in order to make way for so 
arbitrary a system as is provided for them by this bill. 

One limitation upon the discretion of these two irresponsible 
lawgivers ought certainly to be imposed, if the bill is to pass. 
As it now stands, there is nothing to prevent them from legal- 
izing the existence of domestic slavery in Oregon. It seems to 
be understood that this institution is to be limited by the terms 
of the Missouri compromise, and is nowhere to be permitted in 
the American Union above the latitude of 36'-' 30'. There is 
nothing, however, to enforce this understanding in the present 
case. The published documents prove that Indian slavery 
already exists in Oregon. I intend, therefore, to move, when- 
ever it is in order to do so, the insertion of an express declara- 
tion that " there shall neither be slavery, nor involuntary servi- 
tude, in this Territory, except for crime, whereof the party shall 
have been duly convicted." * 

But I am in hopes, Mr. Chairman, that the bill will not be- 
come a law at the present session, in any shape. Every thing 

* This amendment was subsequently offered by Mr. Winthrop, and adopted by a 
vote of 131 to 69. 



GREAT BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES. 479 

conspires, in my judgment, to call for the postponement of any- 
such measure to a future day. We ought not to contemplate 
the possibility of a question like this being settled otherwise 
than by peaceful negotiations. We ought to give ample time 
for those negotiations, and do nothing which can interrupt or 
embarrass them. We have nothing to regret in our past nego- 
tiations with Great Britain ; we have nothing to fear from those 
in which we are now engaged. Reproaches as to the former, 
and menaces as to the latter, are alike but the ebullitions of 
party heat or personal hate, and will perish with the breath in 
which they are uttered. Mr. Webster has dared to preserve the 
peace of the country by abating something of our extreme terri- 
torial claims on the Northeast, and he has earned the gratitude 
of all good citizens by doing so. I trust Mr. Calhoun will not 
be frightened out of that kindred spirit of conciliation and con- 
cession, which he has already manifested on this subject in the 
Senate, by the bluster and braggardism of this debate. We have 
twice offered to compromise with Great Britain on the 49th 
parallel of latitude, and such a compromise would be the very 
best result that we have a right to anticipate now. And even if 
some slight deviations from this line should be found necessary 
for effecting a peaceful settlement of the question, the sober 
judgment of the nation would not hesitate to approve the con- 
cession. 

But, Mr. Chairman, if gentlemen will insist on contemplating 
the necessity of a resort to arras upon this question — if they 
have come to the conclusion that, inasmuch as the 49th parallel 
has been twice offered and twice refused, there is a point of 
honor between the two nations which can only be settled by a 
fight — if they are converts to the syllogism of the honorable 
member from Illinois, that no English Minister dares to accept 
the 49th parallel, and no American Secretary dares to offer 
more, ergo, they both dare to involve the world in war — still, 
still, I say, postpone the present proceeding. We enter, to-day, 
upon the last month of an expiring administration. A new 
President is about to enter upon the four years' term to which 
the people have elected him. A new Congress will soon be in 
existence to act upon his recommendations. Upon this new 



480 GREAT BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES. 

administration lias been solemnly devolved the responsibility of 
conducting both the domestic and foreign affairs of the nation 
during its next Olympiad. Let us leave that responsibility 
undisturbed. Let us not employ the last moments of our power 
in creating difficulties which others must encounter, and exciting 
storms which others must breast. Rather let us do what we 
may, to secure for those upon whose shoulders the government 
has fallen, a serene sky and a calm sea at the outset of their 
voyage, that they may take their observations, and shape their 
course deliberately ; and let all our good wishes go with them, — 
as my own certainly will, — that they may complete their career, 
without striking either on Domestic Discord or Foreign War! 
If they fail in doing so, let the responsibility be wholly their 
own. 



ARBITRATION OF THE OREGON QUESTION. 

A SPEECH DELIVERED IX THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES OF THE 
IGNITED STATES, JANUARY 3, 1S4G. 



I UNDERSTAND the Chair to have decided that, upon the pend- 
ing motion to refer to the Committee of the Whole on the state 
of the Union a bill for raising two regiments of riflemen, the 
whole question of Oregon is open to debate. The House, too, 
has virtually sanctioned this decision, by declining to sustain the 
previous question a few moments since. I cannot altogether 
agree in the fitness of such a decision, but I am unwilling to 
omit the opportunity which it afibrds for expressing some views 
upon the subject. 

My honorable colleague (Mr. Adams) in his remarks yester- 
day, and the chairman of the Committee on Foreign Aflairs 
(Mr. C. J. IngersoU) this morning, have alluded to the course 
pursued by them last year, and have told us that they both voted 
for giving immediate notice to Great Britain of our intention to 
terminate, at the earliest day, what has been called the conven- 
tion of joint occupation. Though a much humbler member of 
the House, I may be permitted to allude to the fact that I voted 
against that proceeding last year, and to add that I intend to do 
so again now. I may be allowed, also, to remind the House of a 
series of resolutions upon this subject, which T offered to their con- 
sideration some days ago. I know not whether those resolutions 
will ever emerge from the pile of matter under which they now 
lie buried upon your table. If they should, however, I am by 
no means sure that I shall not propose to lay them aside again 
without discussion. Nothing, certainly, was further from my 
purpose in offering them, than to involve this House in a stormy 

41 



482 ARBITRATION OF THE OREGON QUESTION. 

debate about peace and war. Such debates, I am quite sensible, 
are of most injurious influence on the public quiet and prosper- 
ity, and I have no disposition to render myself responsible for a 
renewal of them. I desired only then, and I desire only now, to 
place before the House and before the country, before it is too 
late, some plain and precise opinions, which are sincerely and 
strongly entertained by myself, and which I believe to be no less 
strongly entertained by many of those with whom I am politi- 
cally associated, in regard to the present most critical state of 
our foreign relations. 

I desire to do this on many accounts, and to do it without 
delay. An idea seems to have been gaining ground in some 
quarters, and to have been somewhat industriously propagated 
in all quarters, that there is no difference of sentiment in this 
House in reference to the course which has thus far been pur- 
sued, or which seems about to be pursued hereafter, in regard to 
this unfortunate Oregon controversy. Now, Sir, upon one or two 
points connected with it, there may be no difference of opinion. 
I believe there is none upon the point, that the United States 
have rights in Oregon which are not to be relinquished. I 
believe there is none upon the point, that, if the controversy 
with CTreat Britain should result in war, our country, and the 
rights of our country on both sides of the Rocky Mountains, 
are to be maintained and defended with all the power and all 
the vigor we possess. I believe there is none either upon the 
point, that such is the state of this controversy at the present 
moment, that we owe it to ourselves, as guardians of the public 
safety, to bestow something more than the ordinary annual 
attention — I might better say the ordinary annual inattention — 
upon our national defences, and to place our country in a posture 
of preparation for meeting the worst consequences which may 
befall it. 

So far, Mr. Speaker, I believe there are common opinions, 
united thoughts and counsels, in both branches of Congress, and 
indeed throughout the country, without distinction of party. 
But certainly there are wide differences of sentiment among 
ourselves and among our constituents, upon other no less inter- 
esting and substantial points. And I am not one of those who 



ARBITRATION OF THE OREGON QUESTION. 483 

believe in the necessity, or in the expediency, of concealing these 
differences. I have very little faith in the kusli policy. I have 
very little faith in the wisdom of keeping up an appearance of 
entire unanimity upon a question like this, where such unanimity 
does not exist, for the sake of mere stage effect, and with a view 
of making a more profound impression upon the spectators. 
Every body understands such concerted arrangements ; every 
body sees through them, whether the theatre of their presentment 
be on one side of the Atlantic or on the other. 

Because Sir Robert Peel and Lord John Eussell, and Lord 
Aberdeen and Lord Palmerston, thought fit to unite in a com- 
mon and coincident expression of sentiment, in the two Houses 
of Parliament, eight or nine months ago, during the well-remem- 
bered debate on the President's inaugural address, I do not 
know — I do not believe — that the people of the United States 
were any the more awed from the maintenance of their own 
previous views and purposes in regar^ to Oregon, than if these 
distinguished leaders of opposite parties had exhibited something 
less of dramatic unity, and had indulged rather more freely in 
those diversities of sentiment which ordinarily lend interest to 
their discussions. Nor am I of opinion, on the other hand, that 
a similar course on this side of the ocean is to have any material 
influence on the action of the British Government. I hold, at 
any rate, that it is better for us all to speak our own minds, to 
declare our own honest judgments, and to look more to the 
influence of our remarks upon our own people and our own 
policy, than upon those of Great Britain. 

I may add. Sir, that in presenting these resolutions at the 
earliest opportunity which was afforded me, I was actuated by 
the desire to put my own views upon record, before the return- 
ing Steamers should bring back to us from England the angry 
recriminations to which the last message of the President may 
not improbably give occasion, and before the passions of our 
people were inflamed by any violent outbreaks of British feeling, 
which that document is so likely to excite. 

I am perfectly aware, Mr. Speaker, that, let me express the 
views which I entertain when I may, I shall not escape reproach 
and imputation from some quarters of the House. I know that 



484 ARBITRATION OP TEE OREGON QUESTION. 

there are those by whom the slightest syllable of dissent from the 
extreme views which the Administration would seem recently 
to have adopted, will be eagerly seized upon as evidence of a 
want of what they call patriotism and American spirit. I spurn 
all such imputations in advance. I spurn the notion that patriot- 
ism can only be manifested by plunging the nation into war, or 
that the love of one's own country can only be measured by one's 
hatred to any other country. Sir, the American spirit that is. 
wanted at the present moment, wanted for our highest honor, 
wanted for our dearest interests, is that which dares to confront 
the mad impulses of a superficial popular sentiment, and to 
appeal to the sober second thoughts of moral and intelligent men. 
Every schoolboy can declaim about honor and war, the British 
lion and the American eagle ; and it is a vice of our nature that 
the calmest of us have heartstrings which may vibrate for a mo- 
ment even to such vulgar touches. But, — thanks to the institu- 
tions of education and religion which our fathers founded I — the 
great mass of the American people have, also, an intelligence and 
a moral sense which will sooner or later respond to appeals of a 
higher and nobler sort, if we will only have the firmness to make 
them. It was a remark of an old English courtier, a century 
and a half ago, to one who threatened to take the sense of the 
people on some important question, that he would take the 7ion- 
sense of the people and beat him twenty to one. And it might 
have been something better than a good joke in relation to the 
people of England at the time it was uttered. But I am not 
ready to regard it as applicable to our own intelligent and edu- 
cated American people at the present day. An appeal to the 
nonsense of the American people may succeed for an hour ; but 
the stern sense of the country will soon reassert itself, and will 
carry the day in the end. 

But, Mr. Speaker, there are other reproaches, besides those of 
my opponents, to which I may be thought to subject myself, 
by the formal promulgation of the views which I entertain on 
this subject. It has been said, in some quarters, that it is not 
good party policy to avow such doctrines ; that the friends of 
the Administration desire nothins: so much as an excuse for 
branding the Whigs of the Union as the peace party ; and 



ARBITRATION OP THE OREGON QUESTION. 485 

that the only course for us in the minority to pursue, is to brag 
about our readiness for war with those that brag loudest. Now, 
I am entirely sensible that if an opponent of the present adminis- 
tration were willing to make a mere party instrument of this 
Oregon negotiation, he might find in its most recent history the 
amplest materials, for throwing back upon the majority in this 
House the imputations, in which they have been heretofore so 
ready to indulge. How easy and obvious it would be for us to 
ask, where, where was the heroic determination of the Executive 
to vindicate our title to the whole of Oregon — yes, sir, " the 
whole or none'^ — when a deliberate offer of more than five 
degrees of latitude was recently made to Great Britain ? — Made, 
too, at a moment when the President and his Secretary of State 
tell you that they firmly believed that our right to the whole 
was clear and unquestionable I How easy it would be to taunt 
the Secretary of State with the policy he has pursued in his 
correspondence, of keeping back those convincing arguments 
upon which he now relies to justify him in claiming the whole 
of this disputed territory, until his last letter, — until he had 
tried in vain to induce Great Britain to accept a large part of 
this territory, — as if he were afraid to let even his own country 
understand how good our title really was, in case he could suc- 
ceed in effecting a compromise ! 

For myself, however, I utterly repudiate all idea of party 
obligations or party views in connection with this question. I 
scorn the suggestion that the peace of my country is to be 
regarded as a mere pawn on the political chess-board, to be 
perilled for any mere party triumph. We have seen enough of 
the mischief of mingling such questions with party politics. 
We see it at this moment. It has been openly avowed else- 
where, and was repeated by the honorable member from Illinois 
(Mr. Douglas) in this House yesterday, that Oregon and Texas 
were born and cradled together in the Baltimore convention ; 
that they were the twin ofispring of that political conclave ; and 
in that avowal may be found the whole explanation of the diffi- 
culties and dangers with which the question is now attended. 
I honor the administration, Mr. Speaker, for whatever spirit 
of conciliation, compromise, and peace, it has hitherto mani- 



41* 



486 ARBITRATION OF THE OREGON QUESTION. 

fested on this subject, and I have no hesitation in saying so. If 
I have any thing to reproach them with, or taunt them for, it is 
for what appears to me as an unreasonable and precipitate aban- 
donment of that spirit. And if anybody desires on this account, 
or any other account, to brand me as a member of the peace 
party, I bare my bosom, I hold out both my hands, to receive 
that brand. I am willing to take its first and deepest impres- 
sion, while the iron is sharpest and hottest. If there be any 
thing of shame in such a brand, I certainly glory in my shame. 
As Cicero said, in contemplation of any odium Avhich might 
attach to him for dealing in too severe or summary a manner 
with Catiline, '•'■ Eo animo semper fui, ut invidiam virtute partam, 
g'loriam, non invidiam, pufarem ! ^^ 

But who, who is willing to bear the brand of being a member 
of the war party ? Who will submit to have that Cain-mark 
stamped upon his brow ? I thank Heaven that all men, on all 
sides, have thus far refused to wear it. No man, of ever so 
extreme opinions, has ventured yet to speak upon this ques- 
tion without protesting, in the roundest terms, that he was for 
peace. Even the honorable member from Illinois, who was 
for giving the notice to quit at the earliest day, and for pro- 
ceeding at once to build forts and stockades, and for asserting 
an exclusive jurisdiction over the whole Oregon Territory at the 
very instant at which the twelve months should expire, was as 
stout as any of us for preserving peace. My venerable colleague, 
(Mr. Adams,) too, from whom I always differ with great regret, 
but in differing from whom on the present occasion, I conform 
not more to my own conscientious judgment than to the opi- 
nions of my constituents and of a great majority of the people of 
Massachusetts, as I understand them — he, too, I am sure, even 
in that very torrent of eloquent indignation which cost us for a 
moment the order and dignity of the House, could have had 
nothing but the peace of the country at heart. So far as peace, 
then, is concerned, it seems that we are all agreed. " Only it 
must be an honorable peace;" — that, I think, is the stereotyped 
phrase of the day ; and all our differences are thus reduced to 
the question, What constitutes an honorable peace ? 

Undoubtedly, ^Nlr. Speaker, the answer to this question must 



ARBITRATION OF THE OREGON QUESTION. 487 

depend upon the peculiar circumstances of the case to which it 
is applied. Yet, I will not pass to the consideration of that case 
without putting the burden of proof where it belongs. Peace, 
sir, in itself, in its own nature, and of its own original essence, 
is honorable. No individual, no nation, can lay a higher claim 
to the honor of man or the blessing of Heaven than to seek 
peace and ensue it. Louis Philippe may envy no monument 
which ever covered human dust, if it may justly be inscribed on 
his tombstone, (as has recently been suggested,) that, while he 
lived, the peace of Europe was secure ! And, on the other hand, 
war, in its proper character, is disgraceful ; and the man or the 
country which shall wilfully and wantonly provoke it, deserves 
the execrations of earth and heaven. These, Mr. Speaker, are 
the general principles which civilization and Christianity have 
at length ingrafted upon the public code of Christendom. If 
there be exceptions to them, as I do not deny there are, they are 
to be proved specially by those who allege them. Is there, then, 
any thing in the Oregon controversy, as it now stands before us, 
which furnishes an exception to these general principles? — any 
thing which would render a pacific policy discreditable, or which 
would invest war with any degree of true honor ? I deny it 
altogether. I reiterate the propositions of the resolutions on 
your table. I maintain, — 

1. That this question, from its very nature, is peculiarly and 
eminently one for negotiation, compromise, and amicable adjust- 
ment. 

2. That satisfactory evidence has not yet been afforded that 
no compromise which the United States ought to accept can be 
effected. 

3. That, if no other mode of amicable settlement remains, 
arbitration ought to be resorted to ; and that this government 
cannot relieve itself from its responsibility to maintain the peace 
of the country while arbitration is still untried. 

I perceive, sir, that the brief time allowed us in debate will 
compel me to deal in the most summary way with these pro- 
positions, and that I must look to other opportunities for doing 
full justice either to them or to myself. Let me hasten, how- 
ever, to do them what justice I may. 



488 ARBITRATION OF THE OREGON QUESTION. 

There are three distinct views in which this question may be 
presented, as one peculiarly fit for negotiation and compromise. 
In the first place, there is the character of the subject-matter of 
the controversy. Unquestionably there may be rights and claims 
not of a nature to admit of compromise, and as to which there 
must be absolute and unconditional relinquishment on one side 
or the other, or a conflict is inevitable. I may allude to the 
impressment of our seamen as an example, — a practice which 
could not be renewed by Great Britain at any moment, or under 
any circumstances, without producing immediate hostilities. But 
here we have as the bone of our contention, a vast and vacant 
territory, thousands of miles distant from both countries, entirely 
capable of division, and the loss of any part, I had almost said 
of the whole, of which, would not be of the smallest practical 
moment to either of them ; — a territory the sovereignty of which 
might remain in abeyance for half a century longer without 
serious inconvenience or detriment to anybody, and in reference 
to which there is certainly not the slightest pretence of a neces- 
sity for summary or precipitate action. We need ports on the 
Pacific. As to land, we have millions of acres of better land 
still unoccupied on this side of the mountains. What a spec- 
tacle it would be, in the sight of men and of angels, for the two 
countries which claim to have made the greatest advances in 
civilization and Christianity, and which are bound together by 
so many ties of nature and art, of kindred and of commerce, 
each of them with possessions so vast and various, to be seen 
engaging in a conflict of brute force for the immediate and ex- 
clusive occupation of the whole of Oregon I The annals of 
barbarism would afford no parallel to such a scene ! 

In the second place, sir, there is the character of the title to 
this territory on both sides. I shall attempt no analysis or his- 
tory of this title. I am certainly not disposed to vindicate the 
British title ; and as to the American, there is nothing to be 
added to the successive expositions of the eminent statesmen 
and diplomatists by whom it has been illustrated. But, after 
all, what a title it is to fight about I Who can pretend that it 
is free from all diHiculty or doubt? Who would take an acre 
■ of land upon such a title as an investment, without the warranty 



ARBITRATION OF THE OREGON QUESTION. 489 

of something more than the two regiments of riflemen for which 
your bill provides ? Of what is the title made up ? Vague 
traditions of settlement, musty records of old voyages, con- 
flicting claims of discovery, disputed principles of public law, 
acknowledged violations of the rights of aboriginal occupants — 
these are the elements — I had almost said the beggarly ele- 
ments — out of which our clear and indisputable title is com- 
pounded. I declare to you, Sir, that as often as I thread the 
mazes of this controversy, it seems to me to be a dispute as to 
the relative rights of two parties to a territory, to which neither 
of them has any real right whatever; and I should hardly blame 
the other nations of the world for insisting on coming in for 
scot and lot in the partition of it. Certainly, if we should be 
so false to our character as civilized nations as to fight about it, 
the rest of Christendom would be justified, if they had the 
power, in treating us as we have always treated the savage 
tribes of oar own continent, and turning us both out altogether. 

Why, look at a single fact in the history of this controversy. 
In 1818, we thought our title to Oregon as clear and as unques- 
tionable as we think it now. We proposed then to divide it 
with Great Britain, without the slightest reference to any third 
party in interest. Yet at that very moment Spain was in pos- 
session of those rights of discovery, which, since they were 
transferred to us by the treaty of Florida, we consider as con- 
stituting one of the strongest elements in our whole case. It is 
a most notable incident, that in the discussions of 1818 not a 
word was said in regard either to the rights of Spain or to the 
Nootka convention. Yet now Great Britain and the United 
States are found placing their principal reliance on these two 
sources of title. Is there not enough in this historical fact to 
lead us to distrust our own judgments and our own conclusions, 
and to warn us of the danger of fixing our views so exclusively 
on our own real or imagined wants or interests, as to overlook 
the rights of others ? 

Let me not be misunderstood, Mr. Speaker. I have no hesi- 
tation in saying that I honestly think, upon as dispassionate a 
review of the correspondence as I am capable of, that the Ameri- 
can title to Oregon is the best now in existence. But I hon- 



490 ARBITRATION OP THE OREGON QUESTION. 

estly think, also, that the whole character of the title is too con- 
fused and complicated to justify any arbitrary and exclusive 
assertions of right, and that a compromise of the question is 
every way consistent with reason, interest, and honor. 

There is one element in our title, however, which I confess 
that I have not named, and to which I may not have done en- 
tire justice. I mean that new revelation of right, which has 
been designated as the right of our manifest destiny to spread 
over this whole continent. It has been openly avowed, in a 
leading administration journal, that this, after all, is our best and 
strongest title ; one so clear, so preeminent, and so indisputable, 
that if Great Britain had all our other titles in addition to her 
own, they would weigh nothing against it. The right of our 
manifest destiny I There is a right for a new chapter in the law 
of nations; or rather in the special laws of our own country; 
for I suppose the right of a manifest destiny to spread, will not 
be admitted to exist in any nation except the universal Yankee 
nation I This right of our manifest destiny, Mr. Speaker, re- 
minds me of another source of title which is worthy of being 
placed beside it. Spain and Portugal, we all know, in the early 
part of the sixteenth century laid claim to the jurisdiction of 
this whole northern continent of America. Francis I. is related 
to have replied to this pretension, that he should like to see the 
clause in Adam^s Will, in which their exclusive title was found. 
Now, Sir, I look for an early reproduction of this idea. I have 
no doubt that if due search be made, a copy of this primeval 
instrument, with a clause giving us the whole of Oregon, can 
be somewhere hunted up. Perhaps it may be found in that 
same Illinois cave in which the Mormon Testament has been 
discovered. I commend the subject to the attention of those in 
that neighborhood, and will promise to withdraw all my opposi- 
tion to giving notice or taking possession, whenever the right of 
our manifest destiny can be fortified by the provisions of our 
great First Parent's last will and testament ! 

Mr. Speaker, there is a third, and, in my judgment, a still more 
conclusive reason for regarding this question as one for negotia- 
tion and compromise. I refer to its history, and to the admis- 
sions on both sides which that history contains. For thirty years 



ARBITRATION OF THE OREGON QUESTION. 491 

this question has been considered and treated as one not of title, 
but of boundary. To run a boundary line between Great Britain 
and the United States from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific 
Ocean, — this has been the avowed object of each successive nego- 
tiation. It has been so treated by Mr. Monroe, and Mr. Adams, and 
Mr. Gallatin, and Mr. Rush, and by all the other American states- 
men who have treated of it at all. Offers of compromise and ar- 
rangement have been repeatedly made on both sides on this basis. 
Three times we have offered to Great Britain to divide with her 
on the 49th parallel of latitude, and to give her the navigation 
of the Columbia into the bargain. Mr. Polk and Mr. Buchanan 
themselves have acted upon the same principle up to the moment 
of the final abrupt termination of the negotiations. They have 
offered again to make the 49th parallel the boundary line between 
the possessions of Great Britain and the United States in the 
Northwestern Territory. With what face, then, can we now 
turn round and declare that there is no boundary line to be run, 
nothing to negotiate about, and that any such course would 
involve a cession and surrender of American soil I Such a 
course would be an impeachment of the conduct of the distin- 
guished statesmen whose names I have mentioned. It implies 
an imputation upon the present President of the United States 
and his Secretary of State. And, explain it as we may, it 
would be regarded as an unwarrantable and offensive assump- 
tion by the whole civilized world. 

Sir, I am glad to perceive that the language of the President's 
message is in some degree conformable to this view. He tells 
us that the history of the negotiation thus far " affords satisfac- 
tory evidence," not that no compromise ought to be made, but 
that " no compromise which the United States ought to accept 
can be effected." 

And this brings me to another of my propositions. I take 
issue with the message on this point. I deny that the rejection 
of the precise offer which was made to Great Britain last sum- 
mer, has furnished satisfactory evidence that no compromise 
which the United States ought to accept can be effected. Cer- 
tainly, I regret that Great Britain did not accept that offer. 
Certainly, I think that this question might fairly be settled on 



492 ARBITRATION OF THE OREGON QUESTION. l! 

the basis of the 49th parallel ; and I believe sincerely that, if 
precipitate and offensive steps be not taken on our part, the 
question will ultimately be settled on that basis. But there may 
be little deviations from that line required, to make it acceptable 
to Great Britain ; and, if so, we ought not to hesitate in making 
them. I deny that the precise offer of Mr. Buchanan is the only 
one which the United States ought to accept for the sake of 
peace. Such a suggestion is an impeachment of the wisdom 
and patriotism of men by no means his inferiors, who have made 
other and more liberal offers. I think that we ought to accept a 
compromise at least as favorable to Great Britain as the one 
which we have three times proposed to her. If we are unwilling to 
give her the navigation of the Columbia, we should provide some 
equivalent for it. If the question is to be amicably settled, it 
must be settled on terms consistent with the honor of both par- 
ties. And nobody can imagine that Great Britain will regard it 
as consistent with her honor, to take a line less favorable to her 
interests, than that which she has three times declined within 
the last thirty years. Let me say, however, in regard to the 
navigation of the Columbia, that, if I understand it aright, it is 
of very little importance whether we give it or withhold it, as the 
river is believed not to be navigable at all, where it is struck by 
the forty-ninth parallel of latitude. I trust that we shall not add 
folly to crime,'by going to war rather than yield the navigation 
of an unnavigable river. 

And here. Sir, I have a word to say in reference to a remark 
made by the honorable member from New York wdio has just 
taken his seat, (Mr. Preston King.) I understood him to say 
that the Administration, in making the offer of the forty-ninth 
parallel to Great Britain during the last summer, did it with the 
jjerfect understanding that it would be rejected. I appeal to the 
honorable member to say whether I have quoted him correctly. 

Mr. P. King. I said 1 had heard it, and believed it to be so. 

Mr. WixTHROP. There is an admission to which I wish to 
call the solemn attention of the House and of the country. I 
trust in Heaven that the honorable member is mistaken. I trust, 
for the honor of the country, that the chairman of the Committee 
on Foreign Affairs will obtain oflicial authority to contradict this 
statement. 



ARBITRATION OF THE OREGON QUESTION. 493 

Mr. C. J. Ingersoll. I will not wait for any authority. I 
deny it most unqualifiedly. 

Mr. P. King. I have no other authority on this subject than 
public rumor, and this I believe to be correct. 

Mr. WiNTHROP. It cannot be correct. What sort of an ad- 
ministration are you supporting, if you can believe them to have 
been guilty of an act of such gross duplicity in the face of the 
world, in order to furnish themselves with a pretext for war? I 
would not have heard their enemy suggest such an idea. 

Mr. P. King. Any man 'df common sense might have known 
that such a proposition to the British Government would be 
rejected, as it has been, without even being remitted across the 
water. 

Mr. WiNTHROP. Better and better. I thank the honorable 
miember even more for the admission he has now made. 

Mr. P. King. You are welcome to it. 

Mr. WiNTHROP. I am under no particular obligation to vin-- 
dicate the course of the present Administration. But, as an 
American citizen, without regard to party, and with a single eye 
to the honor of my country, I would indignantly repel the idea 
that our Government, in whosesoever hands it might be, could 
be guilty of so scandalous and abominable an act as that which 
has now been imputed to it by one of its peculiar defenders. 
But the honorable member admits that any man of common 
sense must have understood, that the minister of Great Britain 
would refuse the offer which was thus made, (hypocritically made, 
as he believes,) and would refuse it precisely as it has been re- 
fused, without even transmitting it across the water. What, 
then, becomes of all the indignation which has been expressed 
and implied by the Administration and its friends, from the 
Secretary of State downwards, at the rejection, and more par- 
ticularly at the manner of the rejection, of that ofter ? Why, it 
seems, after all, that the honorable member and myself are not 
so very far apart. This admission of his is entirely in accord- 
ance with the view which I have already expressed, that if any 
compromise whatever was to be made, (and I rejoice to find that 
even the chairman of the Committee of Foreign Affairs has this 
morning emphatically denominated himself a compromiser,) the 

42 



494 ARBITRATION OF THE OREGON QUESTION. 

rejection of this precise offer does not authorize us to leap at 
once to the conclusion, that " no compromise which the United 
States ought to accept can be eflected." If our Government 
has thus far made no offer, except one which " any man of com- 
mon sense might have known would be rejected precisely as it 
has been," I trust it will bethink itself of making another offer 
hereafter, which will afford to Great Britain a less reasonable pre- 
text for so summary a proceeding. 

But, INIr. Speaker, it is certainly possible that, with the best 
intentions on both sides of the water, all efforts at negotiating a 
compromise may fail. It may turn out hereafter, though I deny 
that it is yet proved, that no compromise which the United 
States ought to accept can be effected. What then ? Is there 
no resort but war? Yes, yes ; there is still another easy and 
obvious mode of averting that fearful alternative. I mean arbi- 
tration ; a resort so reasonable, so just, so conformable to the 
• principles which govern us in our daily domestic affairs, so con- 
formable to the spirit of civilization and Christianity, that no 
man will venture to say one word against it in the abstract. 
But then we can find no impartial arbiter, say gentlemen ; and, 
therefore, we will have no arbitration. Our title is so clear and 
so indisputable, that we can find nobody in the wide world impar- 
tial enough to give it a fair consideration ! 

Sir, this is a most unworthy pretence; unworthy of us, and 
offensive to all mankind. It is doing injustice to our own case 
and to our own character, to assume that all the world are pre- 
judiced against us. Nothing but a consciousness of having 
giving cause for such a state of feeling, could have suggested its 
existence. The day has been when we could hold up our heads 
and appeal confidently, not merely for justice, but for sympathy 
and succor, if they were needed, to more than one gallant and 
generous nation. We may do so again, if we will not wantonly 
outrage the feelings of the civilized world. For myself, there is 
no monarch in Europe to whom I should fear to submit this 
question. The King of France, the King of Prussia, the Empe- 
ror of Russia, either of them would bring to it intelligence, 
impartiality, and ability. But, if there be a jealousy of crowned 
heads, why not propose a commission of civilians ? If you will 



ARBITRATION OF THE OREGON QUESTION. 495 

put no trust in princes, there are profound jurists, accomplished 
historians, men of learning, philosopiiy, and science, on both sides 
of the water, from whom a tribunal might be constituted, whose 
decision upon any question would command universal confidence 
and respect. The venerable Gallatin, (to name no other Ame- 
rican name,) to whose original exposition of this question we 
owe almost all that is valuable in the papers by which our title 
has since been enforced, would add the crowning grace to his 
long life of patriotic service, by representing his country once 
more in a tribunal to which her honor, her interests, and her 
peace might safely be intrusted. At any rate, let us not reject 
the idea of arbitration in the abstract ; and, if the terms cannot 
be agreed upon afterwards, we shall have some sort of apology 
for not submitting to it. General Jackson, sir, did not regard 
arbitration as a measure unfit either for him or his country to 
adopt. Indeed, it is well understood that he was so indignant 
at the King of Holland's line not being accepted by us, that he 
declined to take any further steps on the subject of the north- 
eastern boundary. 

I cannot but regret, Mr. Speaker, that the President, in mak- 
ing up an issue before the civilized world, upon which he claims 
to be relieved from all responsibility which may follow the failure 
to settle this question, has omitted all allusion to the fact that 
arbitration on this subject of Oregon has been once solemnly 
tendered to us by Great Britain. I am willing, however, to put 
the verv best construction on this omission of which it is sus- 
ceptible, and to believe that the President desired to leave him- 
self uncommitted upon the point. Without some such expla- 
nation, it certainly has a most unfortunate and disingenuous 
look. This omitted fact is, indeed, enough to turn the scale of 
the public judgment upon the whole issue. Arbitration offered 
by Great Britain, and perseveringly rejected by us, leaves the 
responsibility for the preservation of peace upon our own 
shoulders. The Administration cannot escape from the burden 
of that responsibility. And a fearful responsibility it is, both to 
man and to God ! 

Before concluding my remarks, as the clock admonishes me I 
soon must, I desire to revert to one or two points to which I 



496 ARBITRATION OF HIE OREGON QUESTION. 

allndod briefly fat the outset. I have already declared myself 
opposed to the views of my honorable colleague, (Mr. Adams,) 
as to giving the notice to Great Britain. I honestly believe that 
the termination of that convention of joint occupation, (I call 
it by this name for convenience, not perceiving that it makes 
any material difference as to the real questions before us,) at this 
moment, under existing circumstances, and with the view, which 
my honorable colleague has expressed, of following it up by the 
immediate occupation of the whole of Oregon, would almost 
unavoidably terminate in war. I see no probable, and hardly 
any possible, escape from such a consequence. And to what end 
are we to involve our country in such a calamity ? I appeal to 
my honorable colleague, and to every member on this floor, to 
tell me what particular advantage is to be derived from giving 
this notice and terminating this convention at this precise 
moment, and in advance of any amicable adjustment. The 
honorable member from Pennsylvania (Mr. C. J. Ingersoll) has 
said that this convention is the own child of my honorable col- 
league. It has been twice established under his auspices, and 
with the advice and consent of statesmen as patriotic and dis- 
criminating as any who now hold the helm of our Government. 
What evil has it done ? What evil is it now doing ? 

The honorable member from Pennsylvania has given us a rich 
description of the rapid influx of population into that territory. 
He has presented us with a lively picture of I know not how 
many thousand women and children on their winding way to 
this promised land beyond the mountains. Let them go! God 
speed them ! There is nothing in the terms of this convention 
which impedes their passage, nor any thing which prevents us 
from throwing over them the protection of a limited territorial go- 
verimient. I am ready to go as far as Great Britain has gone, 
in establishing our jurisdiction there; and no interest, either of 
those who arc going there, or of those who are staying here, calls 
on us to go further at present. The best interests of both parties, 
on the contrary, forbid any such proceeding. Gentlemen talk 
about following uj) this notice by taking immediate possession 
of the territory. This is sooner said than done. What if Great 
Britain should happen to get the start of us in that proceeding? 



ARBITRATION OF THE OREGON QUESTION. 497 

Such a thing would not be matter of very great astonishment 
to those who remember her celerity in such movements, and her 
power to sustain them when once made. Where should we be 
then ? Would there be no war ? 

And what would be the consequences of a war under such 
circumstances; the consequences, not upon cotton or upon com- 
merce, not upon Boston, or Charleston, or New York, but what 
would be the consequences so far merely as Oregon itself is 
concerned ? The cry is now " the whole of Oregon or none," 
and echo would answer, under such circumstances, " none I " I 
see not how any man in his senses can resist the conviction, that, 
whatever compensation we might console ourselves with, by a 
cut out of Canada, or by the whole of Canada, — that under 
whatever circumstances of success we might carry on the war 
in other quarters of the world or of our own continent, — the 
adoption of such a course would result in the immediate loss of 
the whole of the territory in dispute. This, at least, is my own 
honest opinion. 

As a friend, then, to Oregon, with every disposition to main- 
tain our just rights to that territory, with the most sincere desire 
to see that territory in the possession of such of our own people 
as desire to occupy it — whether hereafter as an independent 
nation, as was originally suggested by a distinguished Senator 
from Missouri, (Mr. Benton,) and more recently by a no less 
distinguished Senator from Massachusetts, (Mr. Webster,) or as 
a portion of our own wide-spread and glorious Republic — I am 
opposed to the steps which are now about to be so hotly pursued. 

Sir, I feel that I have a right to express something more than 
an ordinary interest in this matter. There is no better element 
in our title to Orego.n than that which has been contributed by 
Boston enterprise. You may talk about the old navigators of 
Spain, and the Florida treaty, and the settlement at Astoria, and 
the survey of Lewis and Clarke, as much as you please, but you 
all come back, for your best satisfaction, to " Auld Robin Gray " 
in the end. Captain Robert Gray, of Boston, in the good ship 
Columbia, gave you your earliest right of foothold upon that soil. 

I have seen, within a few months past, the last survivor of his 
hardy crew, still living in a green old age, and exhibiting with 

42* 



498 ARBITRATION OF THE OREGON QUESTION. 

pride a few original sketches of some of the scenes of that now 
memorable voyage. My constituents all feel a pride in their 
connection witii the title to this territory. But in their name I 
protest against the result of their peaceful enterprise being turned 
to the account of an unnecessary and destructive war. I protest 
against the pure current of the river which they discovered, and 
to which their ship has given its noble name, being] wantonly 
stained with either American or British blood! 

But while I am thus opposed to war for Oregon, or to any 
measures which, in my judgment, are likely to lead to war, I 
shall withhold no vote from any measure which the friends of 
the Administration may bring forward for the defence of the 
country. Whether the Bill be for two regiments or for twenty 
regiments, it shall pass for all me. To the last file, to the utter- 
most farthing, which they may require of us, they shall have men 
and money for the public protection. But the responsibility for 
brinsiuff about such a state of things shall be theirs, and theirs 
only. They can prevent it, if they please. The Peace of the 
country and the Honor of the country are still entirely com 
patible with each other. The Oregon question is still perfectly 
susceptible of an amicable adjustment, and I rejoice to believe 
that it may still be so adjusted. We have had omens of peace 
in the other end of the Capitol, if none in this. But if war 
comes, the Administration must take the responsibility for all its 
guilt and all its disgrace. 



NOTE. 



The Resolutions referred to in the foregoing speech, and which were ofTered 
by Mr. Winthrop in the House of Representatives on the 19th of December, 
1845, Avere as follows : — 

Resolved, That the differences between the United States and Great Britain, 
on the subject of the Oregon Territory, arc still a fit subject for negotiation and 
compromise, and that satisfactory evidence has not yet been afforded that no 
compromise which the United States ought to accept can be effected. 

llesohed, That it would be a dishonor to the age in which we Uve, and in the 
highest degree discreditable to both the nations concerned, if they should suffer 
themselves to be drawn into a war, upon a question of no immediate or practi- 
cal interest to either of them. 

Resolved, That if no other mode for the amicable adjustment of this question 
remains, It is due to the principles of civilization and Chi-istianlty that a resort 
to arbitration should be had ; and that this government cannot relieve Itself 
from all responsIblUty which may follow the failure to settle the controversy, 
while this resort is still untried. 

Resolved, That arbitration does not necessarily involve a reference to crowned 
heads ; and that, if a jealousy of such a reference is entertained In any quarter, 
a commission of able and dispassionate citizens, either from the two countries 
concerned or from the world at large, offers itself as an obvious and unobjec- 
tionable alternative. 



RIYEPv AND HAEBOE IMPEOYEMENTS. 

A SPEECH DELIVERED IN THE HOUSE OF UEPRESEXTATIVES OF THE 
UNITED STATES, IN COMMITTEE OF THE "WHOLE ON THE STATE OF 
THE UNION, MARCH 12, 1S4G. 



I AM glad of an opportunity, Mr. Chairman, to give something 
more than a silent vote in favor of the bill now under considera- 
tion. I know not how it may be with others, but to me it is 
not a little refreshing, to find this House once more engaged in 
the discussion of measures, which look to the immediate inte- 
rests of our own country, within its rightful and recognized limits. 
We have been so much occupied of late with questions of fo- 
reign relation, — with matters pertaining to recent and remote 
acquisitions, or distant and disputed territories, — that we have 
been in danger of forgetting the old and ample homestead which 
our fathers bequeathed to us. The astrologer, in the fable, is 
said to have gazed so intently at the stars, that he stumbled 
into the well. And we, too, have kept our eyes so exclusively 
on the sister stars, as they have been termed, — the iivin comets, 
let me rather call them, which are sweeping through our politi- 
cal sky, in marvellous coincidence with those which are, at this 
moment, shooting across the heavens above us, and which 
would seem to be, even now, according to the old superstition, 
" shaking from their horrid hair pestilence and war," — that the 
nearer and dearer interests of the people have been almost aban- 
doned to their fate. 

I rejoice. Sir, that we have at last found a moment for with- 
drawing our eyes from Oregon and Texas, and fixing them upon 
our own domestic condition. I rejoice in the contemplation of 
a bill providing, not for the external aggrandizement, but for the 



RIVER AND HARBOR IMPROVEMENTS. 501 

internal improvement, of our country. I trust that no one will 
be afraid of the name — internal improvement. It is a name, 
it is a thing, which ought to rally to its support every real friend 
of the Republic. In every view which can be taken of the true 
interest of the Republic, this bill, and bills like this, must be 
regarded as of no other than first-rate importance. To our com- 
merce, to our agriculture, to our manufactures, (if, indeed, this 
nation is henceforth, under the ruthless policy of the present 
administration, to have any manufactures of its own,) — to all 
our material and to all our moral interests, to our prosperity in 
peace and to our protection in war, to the preservation of our 
political union, and to the promotion of that more substantial 
union, whose best and most binding cement must be derived 
from mutual intercourse and reciprocal interchanges, — to all, 
alike and equally, the policy of which this measure is a practi- 
cal illustration, will lend the most effective encouragement and 
aid. 

Sir, it would be a waste of words to enter upon any detailed 
amplification of these ideas. Nobody denies their abstract just- 
ness. Every one will readily concur with me in the position, 
that nothing is calculated to conduce more to the general pros- 
perity and welfare of our country, than the improvement of its 
landcourses and watercourses, and the increased facilitation of 
all its ways and means of personal and commercial intercom- 
munication. 

Yet this bill meets with opposition; with the sternest and 
most strenuous opposition from some quarters of the House. It 
is branded with all sorts of reproachful and ignominious epi- 
thets. It is styled a measure of profligacy and plunder. It is 
denounced as anti-Republican and unconstitutional. Its friends 
are reproached with resorting to a disgraceful system of log- 
roUing; and a special rule, even, has been summarily adopted, 
under the lead of the enemies of the bill, for the purpose of de- 
feating it in detail, and of breaking up what has been stigma- 
tized as the corrupt combination of its friends. 

I desire to vindicate the bill from some of these aspersions. 
I desire to take issue on one or two of the most plausible 
grounds on which it has been thus rudely and bitterly assailed, 



502 RIVER AND HARBOR IMPROVEMENTS. 

and upon one or two of the artfnl suggestions which are likely 
to prove the causes of its failure, if fail it ultimately shall. 

I begin with the alleged unconstitutionality of the measure. 
I have no purpose, however, of entering upon this part of the 
subject at any great length, or with any particular elaborateness. 
I decline doing so for two reasons. One, that I could have no 
hope of adding any thing new to the constitutional views of the 
subject which have been presented to the House and to the 
country a thousand times before. The other, that after the ex- 
perience we have recently had, of the manner in which consti- 
tutional impediments, the plainest and most palpable, may be 
overlooked or overleaped at will, constitutional arguments seem 
to have lost their whole title to respect. So far as the Constitu- 
tion goes in establishing a frame of government, and in making 
specific provisions for the tenure of office or the distribution of 
duties, so far it may still be cited as an instrument of precise 
import and established authority. But so far as it leaves any 
thing for interpretation and construction, any thing for argument, 
implication, or inference, it has become "a charter wide withal as 
the wind," and one as to whose meaning the weathercocks of the 
hour are the only trustworthy guides. In the proceedings which 
have attended the final consummation of the Texan policy, we 
have seen the doctrine established beyond revocation, that the 
immediate will of the people, as understood and expressed by 
the Representatives, Senators, and President for the time be- 
ing — nay, Sir, that the immediate will of a dominant party, as 
proclaimed at the eleventh hour of some Baltimore Convention 
— is tie facto the Constitution. In other words, a view of the 
Constitution has been adopted and practised upon, in these lat- 
ter days, far more latitudinarian, and longitudinarian, too, than 
was ever dreamed of before ; and that, under the immediate 
auspices, at the direct instigation, and for the peculiar interests, 
of those, who have been accustomed to plume themselves on 
being strict constructionists of the straitest sect. 

But though the day for elaborate constitutional argument 
seems thus to have been brought to a close, I cannot deny my- 
self the satisfaction of reminding some of these gentlemen, who, 
having effected their own darling design by an unmatched out- 



RIVER AND HARBOR IMPROVEMENTS. 503 

stretching of power, would now shrink back again within the 
shell of strict construction, — that the bill under consideration 
may appeal, for a sanction to its constitutionality, to authority 
and to example, which even they will hardly venture to dispute. 

Mr. Chairman, there has been not a little discussion, for some 
days past, as to the precise provision of the Constitution under 
which this bill may be justified. For myself let me say, that 
whenever I have been able to find a uniform current of example, 
running through a long series of years, in favor of the exercise 
of any particular power, I have never thought it important to 
perplex myself too deeply as to the exact clause from which the 
power was derived. Yet I could not but listen with more than 
ordinary pleasure to the able argument of the honorable mem- 
ber from Maryland, (Mr. Constable,) who addressed the com- 
mittee a few moments since, and who derived the authority of 
Congress to pass this bill from the 'power given us expressly by 
the Constitution " to regulate commerce." It was fit. Sir, that 
the vindication of this particular power should come from such 
a quarter. It was in the capital of the State which the honora- 
ble member in part represents, that the first concerted movement 
was made to confer this powder upon the General Government. 
It was at Annapolis, that the incipient measures were taken, 
which resulted in the adoption of the present Constitution of 
the United States. It was there, in the month of September of 
the year 1786, that a meeting of commissioners from some of 
the principal States was held, " to take into consideration the 
trade and commerce of the United States ; to consider how far 
a uniform system in their commercial intercourse and regula- 
tions might be necessary to their common interest and perma- 
nent harmony ; and to report to the several States such an act 
relative to this great object as, when unanimously ratified by 
them, would enable the United States in Congress assembled 
effectually to provide for the same." 

At this meeting only six of the States were represented : the 
States of Maryland, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Dela- 
ware, and Virginia. The meeting was_therefore dissolved without 
having attempted any definite action ; but not, however, without 
having adopted an address to the States recommending a future 



504 RIVER AND HARBOR IMPROVEMENTS. 

convention with enlarged powers. As one of the reasons for this 
recommendation, the commissioners say : " They are the more 
naturally led to this conclusion, as, in the course of their reflec- 
tions on the subject, they have been induced to think that the 
power of regulating trade is of such comprehensive extent, and 
will enter so far into the general system of the Federal Govern- 
ment, that, to give it efficacy, and to obviate questions and doubts 
concerning its precise nature and limits, may require a corre- 
spondent adjustment of other parts of the federal system." 

Out of this recommendation came the Constitution of the 
United States. The great original object of its establishment 
was, thus, to confer upon the General Government " the power 
to regulate commerce ; " and that power was accordingly con- 
ferred in that large and comprehensive sense in which it was 
understood by the commissioners at Annapolis, among whom 
were James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and others of the 
most prominent members of the Qonvention, by which the Con- 
stitution was subsequently framed. 

Under this authority, the General Government, from the earli- 
est days of its existence, has made provision for the promotion 
and protection of the navigating, the commercial, and the indus- 
trial interests of the people. It has done this by light-house 
systems. It has done this by pilot systems. It has done this 
by consular systems. It has done this by currency systems. It 
has done this by coast survey systems. It has done this by the 
systematic establishment of breakwaters, sea-walls, beacons, and 
buoys upon our bays and harbors. It has done this by its sys- 
tematic encouragement of American tonnage. And it has done 
this by its no less systematic legislation for the protection of 
American labor. 

Yes, Sir, these systems, one and all, had their origin " in the 
better days of the Republic," to use the phrase which was em- 
ployed by the honorable member from Alabama, (Mr. Payne,) 
who so pathetically deplored the introduction of the measure 
before us, as marking the degeneracy of modern republicanism. 

I confess, Mr. Chairman, that I was a little astonished at hear- 
ing such a phrase from such a source. " The better days of the 
Republic I " And this from a leading member of the party which 



RIVER AND HARBOR IMPROVEMENTS. 50-') 

assumes to itself an exclusive title to the name of Democracy ! 
What, Sir, the Democracy of this country, the progressive Demo- 
cracy, in the first flush of its recent and most triumphant success, 
with all the branches of the Government under its control, look- 
ing back so soon and with such a sigh to the past, and acknow- 
ledging that the Republic has seen better days and better Demo- 
crats ! If such a sentiment had found utterance on this side of 
the House, it would have been rebuked as an evidence of that 
ultra conservatism, and of that opposition to all progress, with 
which the Whig party of the nation is so frequently and so 
falsely charged. 

In all seriousness, however, I sympathize most sincerely with 
the honorable member in this sentiment. Better days, I freely 
admit with him, — OI how much better days, — this Republic 
has seen in the past; and God grant that it may still see better 
in the future! Better, in all that relates to the moral character 
of its internal administration. Better in all that concerns the 
wise, just, or generous administration of its foreign affairs. 
Better, in every view of its Constitution and laws, and of the 
union and liberty which they were framed to secure. 

And now, Sir, I beg the honorable member to turn back with 
me to the records of some of those " better days of the Repub- 
lic," and to see whether the measures which he has so roundly 
denounced, are altogether without example. Let him open with 
me this first volume of the new and beautiful edition of our 
National Code — a volume worthy in its mechanical execution 
of the rich matter which it contains — and let us follow together, 
for a few moments, the first Congress of the United States, with 
Washington at their head, in their practical interpretation of the 
Constitution which they had just established. 

Their first Act provided only for administering to each other, 
and to the various officers of the State and National Govern- 
ments, the required oath to support the new Constitution. 
Under, the solemn obligations of that oath, they proceeded to 
the work of legislation. And wdiat was their second Act ? An 
act, be it remembered, which was signed by George Washing- 
ton, in the very year in which the Constitution, framed by the 
convention over which he had presided, was put into operation, 

43 



50G RIVER AND HARBOR IMPROVEMENTS. 

and on the very day on which, thirteen years before, the Decla- 
ration of Independence was formally promulgated to the people. 
Methinks, Sir, that if any man, on any day, might be presumed 
to have affixed a signature, in the true spirit which declared our 
Independence and dictated our Constitution, it would be George 
Washington, on the Fourth of July, 1789! And what was the 
act to which he did affix his signature on that day ? 

" Whereas, (says its never-to-be-forgotten preamble,) it is 
necessary for the support of Government, for the discharge of 
the debts of the United States, and the encouragement and pro- 
tection of manufactures, that duties be laid on goods, wares, and 
merchandise imported, Be it enacted," — 

Be what enacted. Sir? That there be no specific duties? 
That no article shall be subject to any duty higher than the 
lowest which will yield the largest amount of revenue? That 
there shall be no discriminations, except with a view to the 
wants of the Government? That salt shall be free, and that 
there shall be no bounty or drawback for the fisheries ? No, no, 
Mr. Chairman, not one of these absurd edicts of the present 
Administration is to be found associated with this memorable 
preamble of the first Congress, or with this memorable signature 
of George Washington. The bill before me contains provisions 
the very reverse of them all. Here is a list of forty or fifty 
enumerated articles, subjected to every variety of specific duties. 
Here are other lists of articles, subjected to ad valorem duties, 
arranged with obvious reference to protection. Here is a duty 
of six cents a bushel on salt ; and here is a provision for those 
allowances and encouragements to the fisheries, under which 
was built up that nursery for seamen, from whence went out the 
hardy mariners who broke the spell of British invincibility on 
the ocean in 1812, and who have defended their country's flag 
in every danger and on every deep. 

In this act, Mr. Chairman, is found the first practical exempli- 
fication of the principles of the Constitution. Here is the earli- 
est development of that " power to regulate commerce," which 
it was the main purpose of the Constitution to confer u\)on the 
General Government. It is employed in this instance for the 
protection of manufactures. Pass to the third act, and you find 



RIVER AND UARBOR IMPROVEMENTS. 507 

it called into exercise again, for the protection of the navigating 
interests of the country. Specific, discriminating duties, are 
there imposed, for the encouragement of vessels built in the 
United States, or belonging to American citizens; and the first 
movement is there made towards the establishment of that great 
monopoly — the coasting trade — which was perfected and con- 
summated by the eleventh act of the same session of the same 
Congress. The honorable member will find in this act the prin- 
ciple of protection carried to the extent of absolute and perpetual 
prohibition. 

Let me call the attention of the honorable member more espe- 
cially, however, to the ninth act of the first Congress, that he 
may see what was the earliest execution of this power " to regu- 
late commerce," in connection with the immediate subject of the 
bill before us. It is here enacted, " that all expenses which shall 
accrue from and after the 15th day of August, one thousand 
seven hundred and eighty-nine, in the necessary support, main- 
tenance, and repairs of all light-houses, beacons, buoys, and 
public piers, erected, placed, or sunk before the passing of this 
act, at the entrance of, or within any bay, inlet, harbor, or port 
of the United States, for rendering the navigation thereof easy 
and safe, shall be defrayed out of the treasury of the United 
States." It is further enacted, " that it shall be the duty of the 
Secretary of the Treasury to provide by contracts, which shall 
be approved by the President of the United States, for building 
a light-house near the entrance to Chesapeake Bay, and for re- 
building, when necessary, and keeping in good repair, the light- 
houses, beacons, buoys, and public piers in the several States, 
and for furnishing the same with the necessary supplies ; and 
also to agree for the salaries, wages, or hire of the person or 
persons appointed by the President for the superintendence and 
care of the same." It is further enacted by the same bill, " that 
all pilots in the bays, inlets, rivers, harbors, and ports of the 
United States, shall continue to be regulated in conformity with 
the existing laws of the States, respectively, wherein such pilots 
may be, or with such laws as the States may, respectively, here- 
after enact for the purpose, until further legislative provision shall 
be made by Congress." 



508 RIVER AND HARBOR IMPROVEMENTS. 

By the terms of this act, Mr. Chairman, we plainly perceive 
that the members of the lirst Congress of the United States, so 
many of whom had been personally and prominently engaged 
in the formation of the Constitution, were not merely of opinion 
that the General Government had the power to establish light- 
houses, beacons, buoys, and public piers in the various bays, 
inlets, and harbors of the Union, and to regulate the pilotage in 
all the ports and rivers of the country, but that they considered 
it one of its positive and paramount duties so to do. The bill 
commences by assuming all the light-houses, beacons, buoys, 
and public piers, which had been already constructed by the 
several States, and by bringing them henceforth under the exclu- 
sive control and direction of the National Legislature. It pro- 
ceeds to speak of the persons, under whose care and superintend- 
ence these various works were to be placed, as national officers, 
to be appointed by the President, and paid out of the national 
treasury. It goes on to sanction the pilot laws of the several 
States, as they already existed, or as they might thereafter be 
enacted, but only " until further legislative provision shall be 
made by Congress." Thus, in every line of the bill is found the 
most explicit declaration, or the clearest implication, that the 
new Constitution had devolved the responsibility of making 
provision for all these matters upon the Government of the 
Union. 

Nor does the phraseology of this bill fail to furnish us with 
the reason upon which such legislation proceeded. " For render- 
ing the navigation thereof easy and safe," — this is the language 
of the first section, and most comprehensive and conclusive 
language it is. It sets forth, wdth a distinctness which defies 
all attempt at mystification, that the rendering of the navigation 
of the various bays, inlets, rivers, harbors, and ports of the 
United States easy and safe, was, in the judgment of the first 
Congress, with Washington at its head, and with Madison 
among its members, a subject of national concern, and of con- 
stitutional appropriation. 

With such language as this before their eyes, how can gentle- 
men undertake to draw distinctions, as they have done, between 
the erection of light-houses and the improvement of harbors ? 



mVER AND HARBOR IMPROVEMENTS. 509 

Let me give them a case. We have, in the harbor of Boston, 
a ledge of rocks, well known to mariners by the name of Minot's 
Ledge. It presents a most dangerous obstruction to our navi- 
gation. Many a fair ship has gone to pieces upon that ledge, and 
more than one seaman has perished among its breakers, while 
his home was almost within view. For ten years past we have 
been calling upon you to place a light-house there, and, during 
those same ten years, cargoes have been lost for want of that 
light-house, the mere duties upon which would have more than 
defrayed the cost of its construction. Nobody doubts that such 
a light-house would be constitutional, and I trust that the day is 
not far distant when it will be erected. 

But suppose. Sir, it were as practicable and as economical to 
remove these rocks, as to build a light-house upon them ; will 
any one presume to say that we have the power to do the one, 
but not to do the other ? Are they not different means of ac- 
complishing the same end? Do not both measures rest alike 
on the same broad principle of "rendering the navigation of the 
harbor easy and safe ? " Upon what imaginable ground can you 
justify one and condemn the other? Even if you deny that 
either step can be taken under the power " to regulate com- 
merce," and proceed to justify your light-house system as an 
incident to the navy power, or to any other power, how does 
that help the matter? What principle of discrimination can 
you set up, which shall forbid you to remove a rock, or a ledge 
of rocks, from the pathway, either of your merchantmen or your 
men-of-war, but which shall give you unquestioned authority to 
build a light-house, by which they may descry such rocks, and 
may sail safely and easily round them ? 

But one word, however, seems to me to be necessary to extin- 
guish the idea which has been suggested, that the power to erect 
light-houses is an incident to the power to maintain a navy. 
The power to build and equip a navy, existed under the old 
Confederation. Yet it was only after the adoption of the Con- 
stitution, as we have seen in this act, that light-houses were 
made the subject of national legislation, or were understood to 
be within the jurisdiction of the Congress of the United States. 

Mr. Chairman, the early acts of our National Legislature, to 
43* 



510 RIVER AND HARBOR IMPROVEMENTS. 

which I have thus referred, are the true practical exemplifica- 
tions of what the Constitution was designed to be, by those who 
framed it. They are of more value to the right understanding 
of that instrument than even the essays of the Federalist, as 
showing, not how it was explained before its adoption, but how 
it was executed afterwards. They bear the same sort of relation 
to the text of the Constitution, w^hich the Acts of the Apostles 
bear to the Gospel narrative. They ought to be studied in our 
schools, and committed to memory by our children, as the laws 
of the Twelve Tables were in the schools and by the youth of 
Rome. The four Acts which I have particularly cited, are parts 
of one comprehensive system. They are consistent chapters of 
one homogeneous statute. Whatever doubts may be entertained 
as to their being all justified by the same precise clause of the 
Constitution, they all obviously rest on one and the same prin- 
ciple of administering that Constitution — the principle that it 
is to be administered for the protection of the people — their 
protection in peace as well as in war — their general welfare, as 
w^ell as their common defence. 

Sir, it was a notable saying, some four or five years ago, of 
one of the most distinguished leaders of the now dominant party 
of the nation, "let the Government attend to its own business, 
and let the people attend to theirs." The remark was made in 
immediate reference to the Sub-Treasury scheme, which was 
then agitating the country, and which is now again about to be 
pressed through this House. It was a remark, however, of broad 
and general import, and it has always seemed to me to express 
the whole distinctive policy of the party to which its author 
belon£;s. " Let the Government attend to its own business, and 
let the people attend to theirs!" I need hardly say that I hold 
to no such doctrine. The party of which I am a member, is 
organized on no such principle of disregard and unconcern for 
the interests of the people. We maintain that this Govern- 
ment of ours was established for something besides " attending 
to its own business," upholding its own authority, and keeping 
its own state. We deny its right to isolate itself from the con- 
cerns of the people, to elevate itself upon a pedestal of proud, 
repulsive, solitary lordliness, and to avert its eyes from every 



\ 



RIVER AND HARBOR IMPROVEMENTS. 511 

thing but its own convenience, its own necessities, or its own 
dignity. We demand, on the contrary, that in all its provisions 
for itself, whether in relation to revenue, or currency, or whatever 
else, it shall keep the business of the people constantly in view, 
and shall shape all its measures to the end of promoting the 
greatest prosperity and welfare of the whole country. Govern- 
ments erected and maintained for the sake of those who ad- 
minister them; rulers in their own right and for their own ends; 
State statues set up for show ; these all belong to other ages, or 
certainly to other lands. The supreme law of our Republic is 
the common defence and general welfare of the People. 

This doctrine, Mr. Chairman, that the Government is to attend 
to its own business, and to leave the people to attend to theirs, 
strikes not alone at the uniform circulating medium at which it 
was aimed. It strikes at the discriminating duties of a protect- 
ing tariff. And it strikes, also and equally, at these very improve- 
ments of rivers and harbors, western and eastern, on the lakes 
and on the ocean. It is one and the same policy, which protects 
labor, provides a currency, and facilitates intercommunication. 
It is one and the same principle of administration, which lifts 
a snag in the Mississippi, removes a sand bar in Lake Erie, 
builds a breakwater in Delaware Bay, or a sea-wall in Boston 
Harbor, issues a national currency at Philadelphia or at Wash- 
ington, or levies a duty for the encouragement of Pennsylvania 
iron or coal. New York wool or salt, Louisiana sugar, New Eng- 
land cotton prints, or Kentucky cotton bagging. Abandon that 
policy, repudiate that principle, adopt this " mind your business" 
doctrine, and not only will snags and sand bars continue to 
obstruct your internal navigation, but American enterprise and 
American labor, in all their branches, will be laid prostrate 
beneath an overwhelming flood of foreign competition ! 

The honorable member from South Carolina, (Mr. Rhett,) 
however, denies, in the roundest terms, that any part of this 
policy had its origin in 1789; and insists on dating the commence- 
ment of the whole of it at "about the year 1820." To my ap- 
prehension this is a plain proieslatio contra factum. It is as 
clearly a mistake, in my humble judgment, as his ascription of 
the memorable phrase, — » We are all Federalists and all Re- 



512 RIVER AND HARBOR IMPROVEMENTS. 

publicans," to Mr. Monroe, instead of to its true author, Mr. 
Jefferson. Until he can expunge from the statute-book the four 
acts to which I have referred, and I know not how many other 
acts scattered broadcast along the pathway of our national legis- 
lation from 17S9 to 18:20, — not forgetting, certainly, that system 
of cotton minimums which was established in 1816 under the 
auspices of Mr. Lowndes and Mr. Calhoun, — he can make no 
headway whatever in maintaining such a position. 

The honorable member, however, not merely insists that this 
whole system had its origin " about the year 1820," but that it 
has always been the main subject of difference between the 
federal and republican parties. The true republican party, he 
again and again declared, have always been opposed to these 
measures. Now, Sir, I desire to join issue with him on this 
point also. I utterly deny the correctness of his position; and 
I proceed to plant myself upon authority, which he is the last 
person who will attempt to shake. The honorable member 
must have forgotten the speech of Mr. McDuffie, of South Caro- 
lina, on the subject of " Internal Improvements," in the year 
1823. Or, certainly, he has overlooked the preface with which 
the printed copy of that speech was introduced to the world. 
Let me read to him, and to the House, the remarks which that 
preface contains, in allusion to a pamphlet which had just before 
been published under the title of Consolidation. 

" Moreover, in the early history of parties, (says Mr. McDuffie,) 
and when Mr. Crawford advocated a renewal of the old char- 
ter (of the United States Bank,) it was considered a federal 
measure ; which internal improvements never was, as this author 
erroneously states. This latter measure originated in the admi- 
nistration of Mr. Jefferson, with the appropriation for the Cum- 
berland road ; and was first proposed, as a system, by Mr. Cal- 
houn, and carried through the House of Representatives by a 
large majority of the republicans, including almost every one of 
the leading men who carried us through the late war." 

" The author in question, not content with denouncing as 
federalists General Jackson, Mr. Adams, Mr. Calhoun, and a 
majority of the South Carolina delegation in Congress, modestly 
extends the denunciation to Mr. Monroe and the whole republi- 



IIIVER AND HARBOR IMPROVEMENTS. 513 

can party. Here are his words: 'During the administration of 
Mr. Monroe much has passed which the republican party would 
be glad to approve of, if they could ; but the principal feature, 
and that which has chiefly elicited these observations, is the 
renewal of the system of internal improvements.' Now, this 
measure was adopted by a vote of 115 to 86 of a Republican 
Congress, and sanctioned by a Republican President. Who, 
then, is this author, \vho assumes the high prerogative of de- 
nouncing, in the name of the Republican party, the Republican 
administration of the country ? A denunciation including, 
within its sweep, Calhoun, Lowndes, and Cheves ; men who 
will be regarded as the brightest ornaments of South Carolina, 
and the strongest pillars of the Republican party as long as the 
late war shall be remembered, and talents and patriotism shall 
be regarded as the proper objects of the admiration and grati- 
tude of a free people." 

I should hardly have ventured. Sir, to address to the honora- 
ble member, on my own account, so severe an admonition as to 
the position which he has assumed, as he will find in these 
remarks of Mr. McDullie. I trust that he will lay them duly to 
heart, and that he will realize the truth of the ancient proverb, 
that " faithful are the wounds of a friend." 

Shall I add, Mr. Chairman, to the list which these paragraphs 
supply, the name of another most distinguished South Carolina 
statesman, now no more, whose memory demands a vindication 
from the charge, of having violated the true republican faith on 
this subject of internal improvements? About the year 1823, a 
bill was carried through Congress, " to procure the necessary 
surveys, plans, and estimates, upon the subject of roads and 
canals," and authorizing the President to cause such surveys, 
plans, and estimates, to be made, of the routes of such roads 
and canals as he might deem of national importance, in a com- 
mercial or military point of view, or for the transportation of 
the mail. In the progress of this bill through the Senate a pro- 
viso was offered, in the following terms : 

" Provided, that nothing herein contained shall be construed 
to affirm or admit a power in Congress, on their own authority, 
to make roads and canals within any of the States of the 



514 RIVER AND HARBOR IMPROVEMENTS. 

Union." Among the voles against this proviso, which was 
rejected, and in favor of the bill, which was passed, was that of 
the late lamented General Hayne. 

If ever there was an act of Congress which sanctioned, to 
the fullest extent, the power of the general government to con- 
struct works of internal improvement, " of national importance 
in a commercial point of view," this was that act. And now. 
Sir, I repeat, that until Washington and the first Congress shall 
have been convicted of having misunderstood the meaning of 
the Constitution, and Lowndes, Cheves, Hayne, McDuffie, and 
Calhoun, of having been ignorant of the nature of true republi- 
canism, this bill will be in no danger of being pronounced by the 
people, either unconstitutional or anti-republican. 

But it is further objected to the bill under consideration, that 
it makes provision for mere local improvements, and that this 
government can appropriate money for nothing that is not 
national. I am willing to concur with gentlemen in the latter 
clause of this objection, and to confine the powers of the govern- 
ment to appropriations for national works. But the question is, 
what constitutes a national work ? The object of almost every- 
one of our appropriations must have a local habitation and a 
local name; yet this, certainly, will not be inconsistent with its 
having a national character and a national consequence. Your 
navy yards are local ; your fortifications are local ; your post- 
offices and post-roads are local; but no one is heard objecting 
to the annual appropriations connected with any of these sub- 
jects of expenditure, on the ground that they are not of national 
concern. The objection is reserved exclusively, and most un- 
reasonably, as I think, for the precise description of objects for 
which this bill provides. 

Let us then examine, for a moment, some one of the items 
in the bill, and see whether, even when separately considered, it 
will not assert its title to be regarded as a work of national im- 
portance. Here is a provision for expending forty thousand 
dollars in improving the harbor of Boston ; and I take this item 
as an example, because the subject of it is more immediately 
within the range both of my personal knowledge, and of my 
ollicial responsibility. The appropriation is one of the utmost 



mVEU AND HARBOR IMPROVEMENTS. " 515 

importance to the safe navigation of Boston harbor, and I am 
confident that, if it were rightly understood, there is no item in 
the bill which would commend itself more strongly to the sup- 
port of the House. There is. Sir, but a single channel for enter- 
ing the harbor of Boston by vessels of the largest class, and 
that, in some parts, a very narrow channel, and by no means a 
very deep one. On the immediate edge of this channel, there 
are a number of small islands. One of these islands, well 
known to navigators by the name of the Great Brewster, owing 
to the stone which formed its natural protection having been 
taken off for ballast, has been, for many years past, exposed to 
the most rapid devastation. It appears from the surveys of the 
Engineer department that, between the years 1820 and 1840, 
nearly six acres, or about one fourth of the whole, had been 
carried away from this island by the action of the waves and 
winds. The ravages committed upon it by the same elements, 
during the last five years, are believed to have been even in an 
accelerated ratio. Meantime, the preservation of the island has 
been pronounced by the Engineer department, to be " indispen- 
sable both as a cover of the anchorages and roadsteads, and 
also to the maintenance of the requisite depths in the channel." 
The whole delritiis of this and the other adjacent islands is 
swept directly into the narrowest part of the channel, and the 
rapid shallowing which has resulted from the operation, is, at 
this moment, the cause of the most serious apprehension to our 
mariners and pilots. Of the urgent necessity, therefore, of a 
sea-wall upon this island, to arrest this process of destruction, 
(and this is the specific purpose of the provision under conside- 
ration,) no man will doubt. 

But the point which I proposed to examine is, how far this 
item is one of national importance, and what are the obligations 
of the general government in regard to it. 

Now, Sir, this particular provision may, I am aware, be vin- 
dicated upon many distinct grounds. In the first place, this 
same channel, whose preservation is at stake, is the only en- 
trance to your great northern naval depot at Charlestown ; and 
the same obstructions which would endanger the passage of our 
full-freighted packet-ships, would leave your full armed frigates 



51G RIVER AND HARBOR IMPROVEMENTS. 

hopelessly aground. It may be matter of serious doubt whether, 
if this work be delayed for five years longer, a ship of the line, 
with its armament in position, could make its way out from the 
Charlestown navy yard. 

In the next place, all your fortifications in this harbor have 
been arranged and constructed with a view to command the 
entrance of this channel, as it now runs. If the destruction of 
these islands should fall short of filling it up altogether, and 
should only result in materially changing its bearings, these 
\yorks of defence, among the most complete and costly in the 
country, will be rendered comparatively worthless. It was in 
this view, Sir, that I pressed so earnestly for the insertion of this 
provision in the Fortification bill at the last session of Congress. 

But it is before us now as a commercial measure, and it is as 
such that I now claim for it a national character and a national 
importance. What part of the country. Sir, less than the whole, 
is concerned in the safe and easy navigation of Boston harbor ? 
Look to its foreign commerce, and to the revenue which is de- 
rived from it. During the last year, there were 2,-330 arrivals at 
Boston from foreign ports — more than six for every day in the 
year — bringing $21,591,917 worth of goods, and paying into 
the Treasury $5,249,634 of duties. There were of course, not 
far from the same number of foreign clearances. Look to its 
coastwise tratle. During the last year there were 5,631 coastwise 
arrivals in Boston — about sixteen for every day in the year. 
From the port of New Orleans alone, as we have been told in 
one of the letters of " a certain Abbott Lawrence," (as an honor- 
able member from New York just now termed him, and it was 
no bad description of him, for a most certain man he is — you 
always know where to find him, and may always rely a 
dently on his statements) — from the port of New Orleans 
I repeat, there were 165 arrivals, many of them of vessels ofihe 
largest class — ships of from 500 to 700 tons burden each — 
bringing corn, flour, cotton, tobacco, beef, pork, lard, lead, &c., 
amounting to many millions of dollars in value. 

Let me state, Sir, with something of particularity, the quan- 
tity of Southern and Western produce which finds its way into 
the harbor of Boston from New Orleans and other parts of the 



RIVER AND HARBOR IMPROVEMENTS. 517 

Union. The statement may be of interest in more relations 
than one, and will not, I trust, be lost sight of, when the worth- 
lessness of a home market is next made the subject of remark. 

During the year ending on the 1st day of January last, there 
arrived at Boston — 

74,120 bales of cotton from New Orleans, 



37,268 


c< 


(( 


cc 


Mobile, 


27,820 


(I 


cc 


cc 


riorida, 


24,085 


I( 


cc 


C( 


Savannah, 


21,948 


<e 


cc 


cc 


Charleston, 


2,378 


cc 


C( 


C( 


Other places, 



Making an aggregate of 187,619 bales. 

During the same period there arrived at Boston 
110,160 barrels of flour from New Orleans, 



170,501 




cc 


cc 


New York, 


103,736 






cc 


Albany, 


40,824 






cc 


Fredericksburg, 


32,266 






cc 


Alexandria, 


23,494 






cc 


Georgetown, 


17,919 






cc 


Richmond, 


5,512 






cc 


Other ports in Virginia, 


19,207 






cc 


Philadelphia, 


21,697 






cc 


Baltimore, 


2,441 






cc 


Other places. 



All this by sea-carriage. All this through the harbor which 
it is proposed by this bill to improve. You must add to this 
182,381 barrels brought over the Western Railroad, to make up 
the grand aggregate of 730,138 barrels of flour, which have found 
a market in Boston in a single year. 

And then there is the import of grain. During the last year 
there have been brought to Boston — 

257,657 bushels of corn from New Orleans, 



25,400 


cc 


(C 


cc 


North Carolina, 


326,345 


cc 


cc 


cc 


Norfolk, 


128,789 


cc 


cc 


(C 


Fredericksburg, 


94,683 


Cf 


cc 


cc 


Rappahannock, 


110,322 


cc 


IC 


cc 


Alexandria and Georgetown 


60.943 


cc 


cc 


cc 


Other ports in Virginia, 


638,620 


cc 


Ci 


cc 


Baltimore, 


470,049 


cc 


c: 


cc 


Philadelphia, 


66,921 


cc 


cc 


cc 


Delaware, 


62,250 


cc 


cc 


cc 


New Jersey, 


122,719 


cc 


(C 


(C 


New York. 



44 



518 RIVER AND HAllBOK IMPROVEMENTS. 

Making, with some 5,000 or 6,000 bushels from other places, 
the vast quantity of 2,371,406 bushels of corn imported into 
Boston in a single year. And you must add all this to the flour, 
and 548, 583 bushels of oats, and 24,184 bushels of rye, and 
65,530 bushels of shorts, to both, in order to form any just esti- 
mate of the value of Boston harbor to the grain-growing regions 
of the Union. 

I might go on with an account of the importation of other 
articles; as, for instance — 

150,025 Southern hides, 
10,597 barrels of tar, 
40,177 barrels of turiDentine — most of it brought from North Carolina. 

But enough has been stated, I am sure, to illustrate the nation- 
ality of Boston harbor; enough, certainly, to dispel the idea, that 
the safe and easy navigation of that harbor is an object of mere 
local concern. 

And now, Mr. Chairman, let me repeat, that I have taken this 
item of the bill as an illustration of my argument, only because 
it belongs to me, more especially, to explain and defend it ; and 
not because I am disposed to regard it as more important, or 
more national, than many other items which the bill contains. 
Indeed, the very statistics which I have adduced, go far beyond 
the mere proof of the nationality of the provision to which they 
relate. If they show that all other parts of the country have an 
interest in Boston harbor, they show, no less clearly and conclu- 
sively, that Boston has an interest in all other parts of the coun- 
try. And Boston, Sir, and the ancient Commonwealth of which 
Boston is the metropolis, have always realized and appreciated 
this idea. Rarely, rarely, if ever, has a Massachusetts Senator, 
or a Massachusetts Representative, in this Capitol, been found 
drawing fanciful distinctions between external and internal com- 
merce, or instituting nice discriminations between salt water 
and fresh. We disavow and repudiate that whole school of 
constitutional construction, which would regard the lakes and 
rivers of the interior as any less fit, or any less legitimate, sub- 
jects of national supervision, than the bays and harbors of the 
Atlantic. We read of one and the same power in the general 
government " to regulate commerce with foreign nations, and 



RIVER AND HARBOR IMPROVEMENTS. 519 

amon<j the several States ; " and we recognize one and the same 
obligation as to all the appropriate incidents of that power. 
We rejoice, too, that the great West is waking up to a con- 
sciousness of her own interests, and of her own rights, in rela- 
tion to the exercise of this power. We rejoice that she is rapidly- 
reaching a strength and a maturity, when these interests must 
be consulted, and these rights allowed. We hail her advent to 
the political mastery over our aflfairs as most auspicious, in this 
respect at least, to the general welfare of the nation. We will 
go with her in the fulfilment of her " manifest destiny " in this 
way, if in no other. We look to her mighty and majestic voice, 
as it shall come up, at no distant day, from a vast majority of 
the whole people of the Union inhabiting her rich and happy- 
valleys, to command the resumption of a policy which has been 
too long suspended ; to overrule both the votes and the vetoes 
by which it has been paralyzed; and, by its potent energy, to — 

" Bid harbors open, public ways extend ; 
Bid the broad arch the dangerous flood contain, 
The mole projected break the roaring main ; 
Back to his bounds their subject sea command, 
And roll obedient rivers through the laud." 

But where is this system to end, says the honorable member 
from Alabama, (Mr. Yancey.) Sir, I hope that it is not to end at 
all. Why should it have any end, as long as the Republic en- 
dures, and as long as any thing remains to be done to render its 
means of intercommunication easier and safer? Why should 
it not go on ? We cannot do every thing at a stroke. Our 
annual appropriations must be limited to the standard of our 
annual resources ; but why should not one or two millions of 
dollars be annually applied to the prosecution of a system of 
improvement coextensive with the whole country? The national 
government is not, indeed, called upon to do every thing of this 
sort. We shall all concur in the doctrine laid down by Mr. 
Calhoun, at the late Memphis Convention, " that whatever can 
be done by individuals, they ought to accomplish ; and that 
whatever is peculiarly within the province of the States, they 
should eflfect." But we shall all, I trust, concur with him, also, 
in his third position, that " whatever is essentially within the 



520 RIVER AND HARBOR IMPROVEMENTS. 

control of the general government, it should accomplish ; " and 
that without any qualification, either as to time or cost. Indi- 
viduals and States are doing their share of these great works, 
according to their ability. Massachusetts has already no less 
than seven hundred miles of railroad in successful operation 
within her own limits; and her capitalists are, at this moment, 
largely engaged in extending similar facilities of transportation 
and travel into far distant regions of the Republic. She asks 
nothing of the national government for any internal improve- 
ment of her own. But in the newer States of the West there 
is more to be done, and far less ability for doing it ; and it is 
their interest, above that of all others, to hold the nation to the 
discharge of its full responsibility on the subject. It is a dis- 
grace to our country, that their magnificent rivers and lakes have 
been so long neglected, and that they should have been suffered to 
be the scenes of such vast sacrifices of property and of life, from 
year to year, for want of a little seasonable and efficient legisla- 
tion. Let me not call them their lakes and rivers ; they are 
ours, as much as theirs. We claim an equal right, and an equal 
interest, in them all ; and we unite in demanding for them the 
prompt attention and persevering action of the only govern- 
ment, whose powers, and whose resources, are adequate to their 
improvement. 

But we are told that the measure under consideration can 
only be carried through by a corrupt system of log-rolling. Gen- 
tlemen saw no corruption in the log-rolling which was avowedi_^ 
resorted to, last year, between the friends of the " reannexation 
of Texas," and of the " reoccupation of Oregon." They descry 
nothing but patriotism and purity in the log-rolling which seems 
about to be employed now, between our own administration 
and that of Great Britain, for breaking down our American 
tariff. But when a large majority of the members of this House 
are found abandoning all mere party considerations, and uniting 
together in the support of measures which are not more calcu- 
lated to advance the special interests of separate localities, than 
they are to promote the general advantage of the whole coun- 
try, why, then, forsooth, they can see nothing but corruption. 

Mr. Chairman, nothing of real value to this Republic ever has 



RIVER AND nARBOR IMPROVEMENTS. 521 

been, or ever will be, effected, without some degree of that sort 
of combination which is thus stigmatized as log-rolling. Mutual 
concessions, reciprocal benefits, compensation and compromise, 
have been the very laws of our existence and progress. Wher- 
ever common dangers have been averted, common wrongs re- 
dressed, common interests promoted, or common principles vin- 
dicated, it has been by a system of log-rolling. It was log- 
rolling which achieved our independence. It was log-rolling 
which established our Constitution. And the Union itself is 
nothing but systematic log-rolling under a more stately name. 

Doubtless such combinations may sometimes proceed from 
corrupt or unworthy considerations; but when the objects at 
which they aim are of such clear and unquestionable import- 
ance, and of such public and general utility, as those which are 
now before us, these unmannerly imputations upon motives may, 
I think, well be spared. For myself, certainly, I have heard of 
but one overture which would seem to countenance any such 
imputations in the present instance ; and that was contained in 
a suggestion, thrown out from the other side of the House, some 
days ago, that the passage of this bill was an indispensable con- 
dition for securing the votes of the Western States, for the 
overthrow of a protective tariff. Such a suggestion would 
seem to imply, that votes are relied upon for this bill upon other 
grounds besides its own merits, and to be given with a view of 
promoting the success of a policy wholly disconnected with it, 
both in form and in substance. This is a species of log-rolling, 
Sir, which I shall leave others to justify. 

The overture to which I have alluded is, however, Mr. Chair- 
man, obviously susceptible of more than one application. It. 
plainly suggests a course of proceeding for saving, as well as 
for overthrowing, the existing tariff. It says to our side of the 
House, " defeat this bill and the tariff shall be preserved," as dis- 
tinctly as it declares to the other side of the House, " pass this 
bill and the tariff shall be destroyed." For one, I will act upon 
no such idea. Believing this measure to be eminently expedi- 
ent and just, it shall have my vote, without regard to the proba- 
ble action of others upon other and independent measures. The 
Whig members of this House occupy a proud position in refer- 

44* 



522 KIVER AND HARBOR IMPROVEMENTS. 

ence to the best interests of the country at the present moment ; 
and I trust we shall maintain it without wavering. The friends 
of the Administration are in a state of manifest distraction and 
division. One portion of them are looking to us to unite with 
them in preserving the peace of the country. Another portion 
of them are looking to us to aid them in accomplishing their 
cherished plans of public improvement. Let us be true to our- 
selves and to our principles, in both cases. Let us join hands 
with the South, in maintaining an honorable peace with foreign 
nations ; and with the West, in carrying out these great mea- 
sures of domestic policy. If the tariff, in the end, be over- 
thrown ; if the revenues of the country, under existing circum- 
stances of public debt and public danger, be cut off; if the Labor 
of the country be deprived of its wages and its work ; let an 
unmixed responsibility rest upon those, by whom a step so fatal 
shall have been taken. 



THE WANTS OF THE GOYEPvNMENT 

AND 

THE WAGES OF LABOR. 

A SPEECH DELIVERED IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES OF THE UNI- 
TED STATES, IX COMMITTEE OF THE WHOLE ON THE STATE OF THE 
UNION, JUNE 25, 1846. 



Me. Chairman, — 

If I had succeeded in getting the floor at an earlier hour 
yesterday, I should have been tempted to reply at some length 
to the honorable member from Louisiana, (Mr. Harmanson,) 
who addressed the committee in the course of the morning. I 
confess that I was a good deal astonished to hear so whole- 
sale an attack upon the existing Tariff from that particular 
quarter. I had thought that if there were any product of our 
country which required and received the highest measure of 
protection, it was the staple product of the honorable member's 
own State. I had thought that if there were any port in the 
Union, which had profited more than another, of the vast inter- 
nal trade which the existing Tariff has aided in building up, it 
was the port of his own proud metropolis. 

But the honorable member founded his objections to the exist- 
ing Tariff, very prudently, on certain alleged injurious influences 
in other parts of the country, and not on any which had come 
within the sphere of his own observation and experience. And 
one of the topics of his severest animadversion was the enormous 
dividends of the Eastern manufacturers. 

Now, I will not weary the committee with details, which have 
often been recited, to prove that the average profits of the East- 



524 THE WANTS OF THE GOVERNMENT 

em manufacturers have been as low as those of persons employed 
in any other line of business, and probably a good deal lower 
than those of the Louisiana sugar planter. But I do desire to 
present to those who are continually harping on this string, — 
not excepting the Secretary of the Treasury, who has touched 
it somewhat rudely in his annual report, — a plain practical test 
of the trutli and justice of this charge. 

The manufacture of cotton is not, like the culture of cotton, 
necessarily a local business. There is excellent water-power, 
and an abundance of human labor, all over the country. Nume- 
rous cotton-mills have already been established in the Southern 
States. In Virginia, in North Carolina, in Georgia, the hum 
of the spindle is beginning to be a familiar sound. Even in 
South Carolina, I believe, it is not altogether unheard. My 
honorable friend from South Carolina, (Mr. Holmes,) smiles. 
Sir, I remember seeing in a newspaper, for which I was indebted 
to his own politeness, a call for a meeting, to be holden on the 
17th of June, in one of the districts of South Carolina, last 
year, for the double purpose of celebrating the battle of Bunker 
Hill and taking measures for building a cotton-mill ! The per- 
sons who called that meeting, it seems, understood the patriotism, 
as well as the policy, of establishing domestic manufactures. 
They had not forgotten the resolution which passed the British 
Parliament a few years before the battle of Bunker Hill was 
fought, " That the erection of manufactories in the colonies doth 
tend to diminish their dependence on the mother country." I 
heartily hope that this spirit will spread. I believe it is spread- 
ing, and that, half a century hence, our country will be as re- 
markable as a cotton-spinning country, as it is now as a cotton- 
growing country. 

But what I wished particularly to say was this ; — that if it 
be not quite convenient, just yet, for our Southern friends to 
try the experiment of these enormous dividends on their own 
ground, they can easily have an opportunity elsewhere. The 
stocks of these New England factories, which are so much com- 
plained of for doing so good a business, can be had on the Bos- 
ton Exchange every day in the week. They may be purchased, 
either at public auction or at private sale, by any one who 



AND THE WAGES OF LABOR. 525 

wishes to buy. And, what is more remarkable, Sir, not a few 
of them may be bought below par. I have here a price current 
of a few weeks ago, which gives the rates of the actual sales of 
the day, and from which it appears that almost any of these 
stocks may be had at a small advance, many of them at par, 
and not a few below it. Here they are : The Appleton mills, 
the Lawrence mills, the Thorndike mills, the Lowell mills ; you 
may take shares to suit yourselves, and come in for scot and 
lot in all their exorbitant earnings. 

Before you determine to do so, however, you will, perhaps, be 
disposed to propound to yourselves some such questions as these : 
— Can it be true, that stocks which can be purchased at such 
rates, can yield, uniformly and certainly, dividends so enormous? 
The Yankees are sharp enough. Heaven knows, at a bargain ; 
would they be likely to sell, for a thousand dollars, that which 
w^ould give them a regular and reliable interest on two or three 
thousand ? Must it not be, on the other hand, that the great 
profits which are so much harped upon, are only the exceptions 
to the general rule; and that the average earnings are, after all, 
only a fair interest on the investment? And is there, too, any 
real monopoly about a business which any one can take a share 
in, who pleases ? Can we, while it is in our power to build cot- 
ton-mills for ourselves, or to buy into those which are already 
estabhshed, complain of the system which protects them from a 
ruinous foreign competition, as so very grievous and grinding 
an oppression ? 

If the honorable member from Louisiana would ponder a 
little upon these interrogatories, I am sure he would be less vio- 
lent in his denunciation of these enormous dividends. 

But I have not come here, this morning, to reply to the honor- 
able member from Louisiana, or any one else, but rather to say 
something on my own account. It is well understood that the 
bill under consideration was ordered to be reported to the House 
by a vote of five to four in the Committee of Ways and Means. 
As the majority of the Committee did not think fit to accom- 
pany the bill with any written explanations of the views with 
which it was prepared, it would, of course, have been inappro- 
priate for the minority to make any report. But as one of that 



526 THE WANTS OP THE GOVERNMENT 

minority, I desire to take this occasion to give my reasons for 
opposing the bill in committee, and for continuing that opposi- 
tion in the House. 

Undoubtedly, Mr. Chairman, the first great object of all our 
tariffs should be to provide revenue for the support of the govern- 
ment. There are no terms in which this principle can be as- 
serted, too absolute and too unqualified to meet my ready and 
cordial assent. I agree to the proposition in the form in which 
it has been stated by the Secretary of the Treasury in his annual 
report, " that no more money should be collected from duties on 
imports than is necessary for the wants of the government, eco- 
nomically administered." And I agree, also, to the converse of 
the proposition, as more emphatically pressed upon our consi- 
deration by the existing circumstances of the country, — that as 
much money as may be necessary for those wants ought, if pos- 
sible, to be thus collected. 

In a time of war, like the present, more especially, an ample 
revenue should be the primary aim and end of all our custom- 
house duties. To replenish the national treasury, to sustain the 
public credit, and to make seasonable and sufficient provision 
for meeting the manifold expenses which are incident to a state 
of war, is as essential to the vigorous and successful prosecution 
of that war, as the mustering of fleets and armies. And that 
Administration will have done but half its duty to the country, 
in the present condition of its foreign affairs, which, looking only 
to men and munitions, shall fail to advise, — 

'• How War may, best upheld, 
Move by her two main nerves, iron and gold, 
In all her equipage." 

I need not say, that I deeply deplore the occurrence of the 
war in which the country is involved, I have had neither part 
nor lot in the policy which has occasioned it, but have opposed 
that policy, from beginning to end, to the best of my ability. I 
voted for the bill recognizing the existence of the war, and au- 
thorizing the employment of men and money for its prosecution, 
with unfeigned reluctance and pain. The day can never be when 
I can vote, without reluctance and without pain, for any bill, 



AND THE WAGES OF LABOR. 527 

under any circumstances, which looks to an issue of battle and 
of blood. I feel deeply that such conflicts are unbecoming 
civilized and Christian men. Not even the brilliant exploits of 
our troops at Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma, though they 
may fill me with admiration for the bravery of those who 
achieved them, can dazzle me, for an instant, into the delusion, 
that such scenes are worthy of the age in which we live. 

There was phraseology, too, in the bill which I would gladly 
have stricken out. Indeed, the question was one on which it 
was impossible to give an altogether satisfactory vote, and I have 
nothing but respect for the motives, and sympathy in the gene- 
ral views, of those who differed from me on the occasion. 

But I believed when that bill was before us, and I believe still, 
that the policy of the Administration had already involved us in 
a state of things which could not be made better, which could 
not be either remedied or relieved, by withholding supplies or 
disguising its real character. And I will say further, that while 
I condemned that policy as heartily as any of my friends, while 
I condemned both the policy of annexation as a whole, and the 
movement of our army from Corpus Christi as a most unneces- 
sary and unwarrantable part, I was not one of those who con- 
sidered Mexico as entirely without fault. 

Sir, I will do the Administration the justice to say, that, in 
my judgment, it adopted a highly honorable and conciliatory 
course, in proposing to send, and in actually sending, a minister 
to Mexico. I said this privately, when the fact was first an- 
nounced in the President's annual message, and I will not hesi- 
tate to say so publicly now. And I do not think that Mexico 
stands justified upon the record, for the rejection of that minister. 
There is much in the published correspondence to warrant the 
idea, that her distinction between a minister and a commissioner 
was a mere after-thought, intended only to cover a virtual retreat 
from her agreement to enter upon negotiations ; and while I 
am ready to make large allowances for her conduct, in consider- 
ation both of the provocation which she had received, and of 
the distracted state of her domestic affairs, and while I would 
by no means be understood to vindicate the justice of the decla- 
ration, that " war exists by the act of Mexico," I cannot yet hold 



528 THE WANTS OF THE GOVERNMENT 

her discharged from some share of the responsibility for the rup- 
ture which has ensued. Still less can she be acquitted of all 
responsibility for the continuance of the war, in case she shall 
persist in declining the overtures which have again been distinctly 
held out to her. 

Mr. Chairman, I plead guilty to something of an extreme 
jealousy in regard to the faith, and even the forms, of diplo- 
matic intercourse. Missions, mediations, arbitrations, negotia- 
tions of every sort, are the select and sacred instruments of 
peace. They are the only instruments upon which we can rely 
for the amicable adjustment of international disputes. And, as 
a friend of peace, I am for holding to a strict accountability 
every nation which shall trifle or sport with those instruments ; 
much more, which shall discard them altogether. I will hold 
my own country to that accountability as soon as another. I 
do not forget the bad example she has recently exhibited to the 
world, in rejecting the proposition of Great Britain for an arbi- 
tration upon the Oregon question. Even the sincere joy which 
I feel at the honorable and peaceable settlement of that question, 
is alloyed by the remembrance, that this unreasonable rejection 
of arbitration must remain, an indelible fact, on the pages of 
our history. It was somewhere said, not long ago, that Oregon 
was the last spot on the face of the globe, of which the original 
discovery and proprietorship was in dispute. The map of the 
world is now filled up. And would it not have been a cheering 
circumstance to the friends of humanity and peace, if, on the 
deed of partition of that one last spot of disputed territory, there 
could have been inscribed, in characters which the world might 
read forever, the concurrent and cordial testimony of two of the 
most powerful and civilized nations of the earth, in favor of a 
mode of settling international disputes, so reasonable and so 
righteous as arbitration? There is not the slightest reason to 
imagine, that the result of such a course would have been less 
favorable to our pretensions than that which has now been 
accomplished. But even if it had been so, the difference of a 
few acres of land would, in my judgment, have been unworthy 
of consideration, in comparison with the honor of such a pro- 
ceeding to ourselves, and the priceless influence of such an ex- 
ample upon the world. 



AND THE WAGES OF LABOR. 529 

But enough of Oregon, and enough of the causes of the 
Mexican war. The war exists. It is to be prosecuted, as the 
President has assured us, for no purpose of aggression or con- 
quest. He stands solemnly pledged to the country and to the 
world, by reiterated declarations, that he will be " prepared to 
renew negotiations whenever Mexico shall be ready to receive 
propositions, or to make propositions of her own;" and that he 
will be " at all times ready to conclude an honorable peace, when- 
ever the Mexican Government shall manifest a like disposition." 
The honor of the Executive, and the honor of the nation, are 
committed to the fulfilment of these pledges ; and as long as I 
shall perceive nothing in the conduct of the Administration in- 
consistent with their fulfilment, I shall not withhold my vote 
from any reasonable supplies which may be called for. I shall 
vote for them, not for any purpose of plunder or aggression — 
not to enable our fleets to conquer California, or our armies " to 
revel in the halls of the Montezumas," but to enable the Presi- 
dent to achieve that honorable peace, which he has solemnly 
promised to bring about at the earliest possible moment. My 
motto will thus be that of my own honored Commonwealth, — 
'■'■Ense — quietem.^^ 

But until this result shall be accomplished, Mr. Chairman, as 
God grant it speedily may be, it is the bounden duty of the 
Administration and its friends, to arrange a system of taxation 
commensurate with the exigencies which they have created. 
And if this bill were really adapted to such an end; if it held 
out a reasonable assurance of increasing the revenues and sus- 
taining the credit of the country ; if, more especially, it presented 
the only, or even the easiest and most obvious, mode of supply- 
ing the wants of the Government, I should hesitate much and 
long before interposing any objection to its passage. 

The bill before us, however, was prepared for no such purpose, 
and will produce no such result. It was prepared, as everybody 
knows, long before any war with Mexico was heard of, and while 
the President was still congratulating the country that the annex- 
ation of Texas had been " a bloodless achievement." It was 
prepared originally, I fear, with no higher purpose than to con- 
form to those party pledges, to which my honorable friend from 
45 



530 TUE WANTS OF THE GOVERNMENT 

Georgia, (Mr. Seaborn Jones,) who opened the debate, so directly 
and so frankly appealed in its behalf. It will be carried through, 
if at all, by the mere force of party cohesion and allegiance. 
And its result, if it ever goes into operation, will be, as I firmly 
believe, to deprive the Government of no inconsiderable part of 
the revenues which it is now enjoying. I declare to you, Sir, 
that if I desired to cripple the Administration; if I saw reason 
to think that all its solemn professions of moderation in relation 
to Mexico were hypocritical and hollow, and that it was bent on 
a campaign of ruthless aggression and aggrandizement; and if 
I desired, as I should in such a case most heartily desire, to sever, 
at a blow, the very sinews of so abhorrent and monstrous a move- 
ment, I would do all in my power to speed the passage of such 
a revenue bill as this. 

My first and leading objection to this bill, therefore, is, that it 
will be destructive to the revenue. My first and strongest com- 
plaint against the present financial movement is, that at a time 
of war — at a time when considerations of patriotism call for 
the amplest provision for replenishing the treasury — at a time 
when it is peculiarly incumbent on the party, by whose aggres- 
sive policy war has been brought upon us, to make arrangements, 
at any sacrifice of mere party expediency, for meeting its expenses ; 
that it is proposed, at such a time, to break up a system of duties 
upon imports, which has yielded, and is yielding, a rich and reli- 
able income to the treasury, in order to substitute a merely ex- 
perimental tariff; framed in defiance of all the best example of 
other countries, and all the best experience of our own; and 
which, in the judgment of not a few of our most sagacious and 
practical financiers, will depress our industry, derange our cur- 
rency, cut off" the revenues, and go nigh towards involving both 
the Government and the people in bankruptcy, within eighteen 
months from the time it takes effect. 

Let me not be misunderstood or misrepresented. I am not 
here to maintain, that the existing tarilf is yielding enough for 
all the present wants of the country. I do not forget that we 
have a debt of seventeen millions already incurred, and that there 
is an estimated deficiency of nineteen millions more for the ser- 
vice of the approaching fiscal year. I am quite ready to admit, 



AND THE WAGES OP LABOR. 531 

that it is incumbent on the party in power, to make some pro- 
vision for increasing its resources. And upon them must rest 
the responsibility for originating such a provision. But any 
practical economist would tell you in ten words what that pro- 
vision should be. An issue of eight or ten millions of treasury 
notes, and a moderate specific duty upon tea and coffee, would 
answer the whole purpose; and they are the only measures which 
can do so. Not a twenty per cent, ad valorem duty on tea and 
coffee, to be put on and taken off at the discretion of the President, 
or to be levied during the uncertain period of the war. Nothing 
could be more absurd or frivolous. The time at which the duty 
should begin and end should be fixed, and the term of its dura- 
tion should be long enough to outlast the stock of these articles 
now on hand, or the duty will be a mere nullity. A term of 
less than two years, commencing on the 1st of September, would 
not be sufficient to make the measure effective. The duty, too, 
must be specific, or it will hardly be worth laying. An ad valo- 
rem duty of twenty per cent, upon both articles would scarcely 
yield two millions of dollars a year, while a specific duty of four 
cents a pound upon coffee, twenty cents a pound upon green tea, 
and fifteen cents a pound upon black tea, (rates less than those 
which formed a part of our permanent revenue system a few 
years ago,) would insure you a round sum of seven or eight 
millions a year. Ad valorem duties upon teas, as indeed upon 
most of the other articles to which they are applied in this bill, 
will be attended with all manner of inequalities and frauds in 
their collection, and will be injurious alike to the interests of the 
Government and the honest importer. The experience of the 
whole commercial world condemns them. The commerce of 
our own country, with one voice, deprecates them. Even the 
highest free-trade authority of England testifies against them. 
Turn to the celebrated Parliamentary Report of Mr. Hume, in 
1840, and read what is said of them by two of the principal 
witnesses. 

Dr. Bowring states, (British Report, p. 61,) that the German 
Commercial League or Customs Union levy all duties by weight, 
except on four articles, — corn, seeds, wool, and stone. He says 
the principal disadvantage of the system is, that it imposes the 



532 THE WANTS OF THE GOVERNMENT 

heaviest duties on the coarsest articles. But when asked whe- 
ther he would abandon the system on this account, he says 
" No ; it is the simplest and most efficacious, because there is no 
officer, however uninstructed, who cannot easily apply the sys- 
tem ; and because it is least liable to evasion." 

John Dillon says, (p. 221,) " The fairest mode of levying a 
duty, theoretically, is upon the value ; but to that, very great 
practical objections lie. It is exposed to evasion, and is con- 
stantly evaded. It is admitted almost by all, and few attempt 
to deny, that when they make returns of value, they make false 
returns; it is done in the most open and undisguised manner." 

Ad valorem duties involve, moreover, this hardship both on the 
importer and on the consumer of the articles on which they are 
levied, that they increase as the price increases, and thus render 
dear articles dearer. In this way, too, they aggravate the causes 
which may at any time be in operation to diminish importation 
and revenue, while specific duties continue the same in all fluc- 
tuations of price. 

The Secretary of the Treasury lays great stress on the fact 
that more than half the revenue was collected last year from ad 
valorem duties. Well, Sir, I suppose that if this bill takes effect, 
the whole revenue of next year will be collected from ad valorem 
duties, and for the conclusive reason, that there will be no 
specific duties in operation. But neither the one fact nor the 
other can prove any thing to the Secretary's purpose. He states, 
with an air of triumph, that the revenue from ad valorem duties 
exceeds that realized from specific duties, although the average 
of the ad valorem was only 23.57 per cent., while the average of 
the specific was 41.30 per cent. From these premises he draws 
two conclusions ; first, that ad valorem duties are better than 
specific ; and, second, that lower duties increase the revenue. 
Nothing could be more absurd than these inferences. Even the 
premises are not correct. The Secretary has included among 
the ad valorem duties the cotton minimums, which are virtually 
specific duties. He has omitted, too, all allowance for tiie 
specific duty on wool. Transfer the duties received on cotton 
goods and half the duties on wool to the other side of the 
account, and the revenue from specific duties will exceed that 



AND THE WAGES OF LABOR. 533 

from ad valorem duties. But even if the premises were correct, 
the conclusions would be preposterous. The whole amount of 
the matter is, that, during the last year, the importations of 
articles subjected to ad valorem duties were nearly twice as large 
as of those subjected to specific duties. According to the 
Secretary's tables the value of the former was $60,191,862, and 
of the latter $34,914,862. And the fact that as much revenue 
was derived from the latter amount of importations under high 
specific duties, as from the former under low ad valorem, duties, 
— instead of proving that ad valorem duties are better than 
specific, or that low duties increase revenue, — would seem, to 
common apprehensions, to prove precisely the reverse. Cer- 
tainly, Sir, everybody must admit that the duty which produces a 
revenue of about fifteen millions on an import of about thirty- 
five millions, is more effective, than the duty which requires an 
import of sixty millions to produce the same result. 

But let me return from this digression. I have said that an 
issue of Treasury notes, and a moderate specific duty on tea 
and coffee, are the only measures which can be relied on for 
supplying the exigencies of the present moment. Sir, I have no 
fancy for these measures in the abstract. A tax upon tea and 
coffee, I know, will be odious. But I greatly prefer such a duty 
to that scheme of direct taxatioh which has been proposed by 
one of the friends of the Administration from Tennessee, (Mr. 
Andrew Johnson.) I greatly prefer such a measure, too, either 
to sacrificing the public credit, or to plunging the country deeper 
and deeper into debt. And if the tax be odious. Sir, upon whom 
should the odium rest, but upon those who have occasioned the 
necessity for its imposition ? 

At all events, believing, as I do, that no other measures 
adequate to the exigency can be devised, I am willing to say, 
that if the friends of the Administration will take the respon- 
sibility of bringing forward such measures as these, to be of 
limited duration, and for the single purpose of defraying the 
expenses of the war, and if the tariff in other respects shall be 
left undisturbed, I, for one, am ready to vote for them ; but not 
otherwise. In other words, I will vote for a duty on tea and 
coffee to supply the wants of the Government, but not to eke 

45* 



534 THE "WANTS OF THE GOVERNMENT 

out the insufficiencies of an experimental ad valorem tariff. I 
will vote for such a duty to enable the Government to prosecute 
to an honorable conclusion a war upon a foreign enemy, but not 
to enable it to carry on, indefinitely and wantonly, a war upon 
our domestic industry. I will vote for such a duty to sustain 
the doctrines of free trade, in that old, original, genuine, patriotic 
sense, in which it was associated with " sailor's rights ;" but not 
to sustain that spurious free trade of modern years, which is 
never destined to be associated with any thing but the laboring 
landsmen's wrongs I 

But, while I thus admit that some additional provision for 
supplying the wants of the Government at the present moment 
is necessary, I do, at the same time, deny that there is any 
shadow of reason for changing the existing duties, on articles 
now dutiable, for that purpose ; or that this purpose can possibly 
be so effected. I maintain, on the contrary, that the present 
tariff has yielded, and is yielding, as much as any tariff can be 
made to yield, which does not include a duty on tea and coffee, 
or impose higher duties ; and that, especially, it yields far more 
than the bill before us is likely to do in the long run, even with 
the ten per cent, ad valorem on tea and coffee which it already 
contains. 

Mr. Chairman, the tariff of 1842 has proved itself to be what 
its framers and friends originally declared that it was. What- 
ever else may be truly or falsely said in relation to that act, it 
cannot be denied, that it was passed in the year 1842 as a 
revenue measure, and that it has practically fulfilled, from the 
time when it had got fairly into operation to the present moment, 
this great original end of its enactment. 

Nobody can have forgotten the circumstances under which it 
was adopted. The net revenues of the country, during the year 
ending the 30th of September, 1842, derived from the duties on 
imports, as arranged previously to the passage of the existing 
tariff, were only about twelve and a half millions. This sum 
was, by all confession, utterly inadeciuate to defray even the 
current expenses of the Government. A considerable public 
debt was already incurred. The credit of the nation was seri- 
ously impaired. Treasury notes were at a discount, and loans 
could neither be negotiated at home nor abroad. 



AND THE WAGES OF LABOR. 535 

Under these circumstances, a general sense of the necessity of 
adopting a new system of duties for raising revenue pervaded 
the country, and the tariti* of 1842 was the result. It was 
framed, certainly, not without distinct reference to the encourage- 
ment of domestic industry. Nobody will deny that. If the 
early custom of prefixing to the acts of the national legislature, 
preambles, setting forth the object and occasion of their enact- 
ment, had not passed away, the tariff of 1842 might justly have 
been introduced to the country by the same memorable pream- 
ble which is found at the head of the first revenue law on our 
statute-book. Like the tariff' of 1789, it looked to the irinoda 
necessitas of " supporting the Government, discharging the debts 
of the United States, and encouraging and protecting manufac- 
tures." 

Its primary purpose, however, was revenue. It was arranged 
by the Secretary of the Treasury and the Committee of Ways 
and Means of the time being, with that particular view. Many 
of the duties which have been most commonly carped at, were 
adopted with no other view. The duties on silk goods, for 
instance, were fixed in conformity with the wishes of the import- 
ing merchants, so as to produce the largest revenue with the 
least liability to fraud. The duties on cotton manufactures, 
also, were raised above the standard which was demanded by 
the manufacturers for their protection, with the single view 
of increasing the revenue. 

And now. Sir, I repeat, that this much-abused tariff of 1842 
has accomplished its great revenue purposes with the most 
signal success and certainty. Like all other new systems of the 
sort, it required some little time for getting fairly into operation, 
and for developing its real character and tendencies. And with- 
in the first twelve months of its operation, its opponents were 
not without color for their confident predictions, that it would 
fail of its end as a revenue measure. But further experience 
confounded all such predictions ; and those who had at first 
denounced it on the ground that it would produce too little 
revenue, were soon heard condemning it, with equal confidence 
and increased violence, on the ground that it was producing too 
much. This last apprehension, however, soon shared the fortune 



536 THE WANTS OF THE GOVERNMENT 

of the first, and the act has gone on, fulfilling every promise of 
its friends, and falsifying every foreboding of its foes, and yield- 
ing uniformly just about enough, and neither more nor less than 
enough, for the ordinary purposes of a state of peace. 

The net revenue which it produced for the year ending June 
30th, 1844, was $26,183,570.94 ; and for the year ending June 
1845, $27,528,112.70. 

The Secretary of the Treasury, whose wish has evidently been 
the father of his estimates, has indeed predicted, in his annual 
report, a large falling off" in the revenues of the present year. 
But the result thus far has shown that his predictions were 
unfounded. Instead of $24,500,000 for the whole year, we have 
an ascertained receipt of $20,411,915.42 for the three first quar- 
ters, with an estimate of $6,200,000 for the last quarter, ending 
on the approaching 30th of June, making an aggregate of 
$26,011,915.42 for the whole year, being more than two millions 
more than was estimated by the Secretary. 

And here I cannot but remark on two circumstances, which 
speak volumes in favor of the skill with which this Tariff" was 
framed, and of the success of its practical operation. The one, 
the uniformity of its results for three years in succession ; the 
other, its almost exact accomplishment of the calculations of its 
friends. It was estimated by Mr. Appleton in this House, and 
by Mr. Evans in the Senate, — gentlemen to whom the country 
has often since been indebted for the clearest exposition and 
vindication of the principles on which it was framed, — that it 
would yield an average annual revenue of from twenty-six to 
twenty-seven millions. Its actual yield has been — 

In 1844 . . . . . $26,183,570.94 

1845 ..... 27,528,112.70 

1846 ..... 26,611,915.42 

And now, who shall undertake to say that this was not a 
revenue measure ? What other definition is there of a revenue 
measure, than " one which shall yield, uniformly and certainly, 
the revenue required ? " May we not demand from the oppo- 
nents of this measure, henceforth, the frank acknowledgment, 
that it was in its nature, as we all know it was in its design, a 
revenue tariff"? Must not the whole people of the country here- 



AND THE WAGES OF LABOR. 537 

after admit, that protection and revenue, instead of the " one 
beginning where the other ends" — instead of being in a state 
of irreconcilable and eternal conflict with each other, may go 
along hand in hand together, scattering benefits and blessings at 
once upon the Government and upon the people ? 

Mr. Chairman, they not only may, but they must go along 
together, or no such beneficial result can be produed. I have 
proved that the tariff of 1842 was emphatically a revenue 
measure. I have admitted, also, that it was a protective tariff. 
And now I maintain, further, that it was a revenue tariff, for the 
very reason that it was a protective tariff. You may talk as 
much as you please about your revenue standards. You may 
construct your ingenious theories to your heart's content, about 
the abstract incompatibility between revenue and protection. 
Such things may sound well in a speech. They may read well 
in a report. They may even receive some shadow of support, 
or color of confirmation, from the operation of duties upon single 
and selected articles of import ; or from the experience of other 
countries differently situated. But the moment you put them 
in practice in the construction of an entire system — the mo- 
ment you apply them in full to the aggregate imports of this 
young America of ours, they will prove to be utterly fallacious 
and fanciful. The whole experience of this country shows that 
a revenue tariff, in the free trade sense of the term, is about as 
fitly named as lucus a non lucendo. It will yield no revenue, or 
none certainly, either adequate to the wants of the Government, 
or correspondent to the calculation of its friends. The real 
revenue tariff is the reasonable protective tariff. And the cause 
is as obvious as the fact is undeniable. 

Sir, the productiveness of a revenue system depends not on 
any abstract principles, or arbitrary arrangement of duties, but 
on the ability of the people to import, and pay for, whatever they 
want from abroad. The consuming ability of the people is what 
constitutes or causes the great difference between the operation 
of one tariff and another tariff, or between the operation of the 
same tariff at different periods. And those who should under- 
take, because the tariff of 1842, with high protective duties, 
yields an average income of $26,000,000, to lower those duties 



53S THE WANTS OF THE GOVEP.NMZXT 

and diminish that protection for the purpose of effecting larger 
importations and a larger revenue, belong to the same school of 
financial wisdom with the lad in the fable, who ripped open the 
goose that was laving the solden e£:o:s. 

Let me fortify this position by an authority from a source 
which the free trade gentlemen of the House ought to be the 
last to undervalue. They are accustomed to derive most of 
their arguments and illustrations from the mother country. 
"Whatever jealousy they may entertain of British example or 
British doctrine on other points. — on the subject of the tariff, 
they bow implicitly and deferentially to both. Even the Ameri- 
can Secretary of the Treasury's report seems to lack its essential 
authentication and indorsement, unless it has been printed and 
praised (like that of Mr. ^Talker) in the two Houses of the 
Imperial Parliament. 

Now, Sir, I have here an extract from the London Bankers 
Circular, of the year l'?40, which expresses the doctrine I have 
asserted in the best possible phraseology, and I commend it to 
the attentive hearing of the friends of the present bill : 

~ The prevailing delusion and mistake of all alike, is a desire to extend exports, 
overlooking, or apparently ignorant of the fact, that whenever the export exceeds the 
value which the import will realize, the excess of export must necessarily resolve 
itself into minus in some wav or other. ........ 

" It is the amount which the aggregate imports into any country may realize, that 
constitutes the means of reciprocal and beneficial exchange : and the amount which 
the imports will realize, depends entirely on the condition and power of the community 
at large to consume. The primary object of the government of every country should 
be. to devise means of enlarging the power of consumption by an adequate remimera- 
tion for labor." • 

Here is contained, as in a nutshell, the sum and substance of 
the whole matter. Here is touched, as with a needle, '• the pre- 
vailing delusion and mistake" of the economists whose views 
are represented by the present Secretary of the Treasury. Here 
are contrasted, as in a picture, the sound principle on which the 
tariff of 1S42 was constructed, and to which it owes its success, 
— the principle of •• enlarging the power of consumption by an 
adequate remuneration of labor," — and the fallacy on which 
the bill before us is founded, — •• the desire to extend expons.*' 

This bill is based, indeed, upon a series of delusions, — a 
perfect stratification of fallacies. The foundation fallacy of the 



AND THE WAGES OF LABOR. 539 

series is that which I have already named — that the great and 
only desideratum for the prosperity of this country is to increase 
its exports. As if domestic consumption and domestic ex- 
changes were not worth thinking about I As if the home trade 
of every country were not incomparably more important than 
its foreign trade ! 

The second fallacy in the ascending scale, is, that in order to 
increase the exports of the country, it is only necessary to in- 
crease its importations. As if the characteristic feature of 
American trade, from 1790 to the present day, had not been an 
inordinate excess of imports, — an excess amounting to more 
than 766,000,000 of dollars in a term of fifty years! — making an 
average of more than fifteen millions a year ! As if other nations 
would always be willing to take their pay for these importations 
in corn and cotton at remunerating prices, and would never call 
upon us for a balance in specie ! 

The third and fourth fallacies in the series, are, that the only 
thing needed to secure an increase of importations at any time, 
is a reduction of duties ; and that the consequent increase of 
importations will be so certain and so great, that the reduction 
of the duties will result in a positive enlargement of the revenue. 

Mr. Chairman, in this whole concatenation of assumptions, 
the great laws of supply and demand, and the essential idea 
that the consuming ability of other countries and of our own, 
must ultimately be the measure of what they can receive from 
us, and of what we can take from them, — are left wholly out 
of view. And a system of this sort, instead of " enlarging the 
power of consumption, by an adequate remuneration of labor," 
must inevitably diminish that power of consumption by depriv- 
ing labor of its just rewards. 

Look, for a moment, at the details of the very bill under con- 
sideration, and see if it be not so. The bill aims at an increase 
of importations, and the printed estimates of Mr. Walker look 
to an aggregate increase to the amount of about fifteen millions 
of dollars. Now, nobody can imagine that we are to consume 
fifteen millions of dollars' worth more than we did last year and 
the year before. Those were years of the greatest prosperity 
and of the largest consumption, and we shall do well if we are 



540 THE WANTS OF THE GOVEKNMENT 

able to consume as much, for many years to come. This in- 
creased importation, therefore, can only find a market by inter- 
fering with our own productions, and taking the place of similar 
fabrics of domestic industry. This, indeed, is the very view of 
the Secretary of the Treasury. He gives as a reason, in his 
annual report, for reducing the duties, that the revenue has de- 
clined, owing to " the diminished importation of many highly 
protected articles, and the progressive substitution of the domes- 
tic rivals." He is now for reversing this substitution. He is for 
supplanting these domestic rivals in our own market, by the 
reintroduction of the foreign fabrics. And what must be the 
result? Why, clearly. Sir, that the capital invested in them 
must be rendered unproductive, and the labor employed in them 
thrown out of work. And just to the extent that this is accom- 
plished, the general prosperity of the country must be checked, 
and its consuming ability diminished. 

But let us examine some of the items of which this aggre- 
gate increase of importations is made up, and see what branches 
of labor are to be thus supplanted. I read from the printed esti- 
mates prepared by Mr. Walker himself. In the first place we 
are to have, under the bill as it now stands, an increased import- 
ation of brandies, spirits, and cordials of all sorts, to the amount 
of $365,000 a year, being $1,000 worth for every day in the 
year. Since the bill was framed, however, the Secretary seems 
to have discovered that a reduction of duties will not always 
increase the revenue, and he has proposed to increase the duties 
on brandy and spirits to provide means for carrying on the war. 
He thus first lowers and then raises the duties on the same arti- 
cles, and all for increasing the revenue! He leaves them- still, 
however, much lower than under the tariff of 1842, and esti- 
mates an increased importation of |300,000 worth of brandy 
and spirits. But he has proposed, at the same time, to reduce 
the duties on cordials, and after estimating an increased import- 
ation of them to the amount of $25,000 as the result of raising 
the duty from forty-one to seventy-five per cent., he now esti- 
mates an increased importation to the amount of $100,000 as 
the result of reducing the duties to forty per cent I A change 
of one per cent, is thus to produce an increased importation of 



AND THE WAGES OF LABOR. 541 

cordials to the amount of $100,000! Thus, if his war schedule 
shall be inserted in the bill, we are to look for an increased im- 
portation of all these articles to the amount of $400,000 per 
annum. Add to this an estimated increase of importation of 
wines of all sorts, to the amount of $500,000, under the absurd 
system of ad valorem duties, (never more absurd than when 
applied to articles like wines,) and the temperance view of this 
new democratic tariff is complete. I commend this to the 
Washingtonians. 

Let us look, however, at the items which affect the labor of 
the country more directly. 

Here is an estimated increase of importation of $1,185,000 
worth of iron, in pigs, sheets, bars, bands, rods and hoops. 

Here is an increased importation of sugar and molasses and 
syrup of molasses of $630,000. 

Here is an estimated increase of importation of $2,000,000 of 
the various manufactures of wool and worsted, and of $200,000 
of raw wool. 

Here is an estimated increase of importation of cotton manu- 
factures to the amount of $5,150,0001 

Here is an estimated increase of importation of $125,000 
of coal and coke. 

Here is an estimated increase of importation of cordage of 
$170,000, and of various kinds of unmanufactured hemp of 
$105,000. 

Here is an increased importation of salt to the amount of 
$1,000,0001 

Here is an estimated increase of the different kinds of cotton 
bagging of $300,000; of leather of all sorts, $100,000; of manu- 
factures of iron, $206j000, including anvils, and blacksmith's 
hammers and sledges, and sad-irons, and spikes, and wrought 
nails. 

Then we have $100,000 of earthern and stone ware ; $100,- 
000 of paper-hangings; $50,000 of paper; $50,000 of pins; 
$30,000 of buttons ; $100,000 of window-glass ; $100,000 of 
glass tumblers; $110,000 of straw hats and bonnets; $45,000 
of silk and leather boots and shoes ; $100,000 of linseed-oil : 
$200,000 o{ 2)otatoes: $2,000 of cheese; and an increased im- 

46 



542 THE "WANTS OF THE GOVERNMENT 

portation of ready-made clothing and wearing apparel, made up 
or manufactured, in whole or in part, by the tailor, sempstress, 
or manufacturer ; and of articles worn by men, women, and 
children, made wholly or in part by hand, of $200,000. 

Is it not plain that, if these estimates are to be realized, the 
American labor which is now employed in these various branches 
of manufacture and of the mechanic arts is to be deprived of no 
inconsiderable part of its work and its wages ? Is it not plain 
that, to this extent, at least, it is to be sacrificed to foreign labor? 
Yes, Sir; supplanted as an unworthy rival! that's the Secre- 
tary's word. And who is to pay for these increased importa- 
tions, under these circumstances ? This very American labor, 
which you propose to rob of its birthright, contributes to the 
revenue of the government by consuming, according to its 
ability, some portion of the foreign goods now imported. These 
very hatters, and shoemakers, and tailors, and sempstresses, and 
iron-makers, and cotton-spinners, and glass-makers, and salt- 
makers, and all the rest, whom you intend to deprive of a part 
of their work and of their wages, are now able to purchase, with 
their surplus earnings, some humble share of the foreign luxu- 
ries from which your revenue is mainly derived. But they will 
be able to do so no longer. How, then, is your revenue to be 
increased? How is it even to be kept up at the point which it 
has now reached? The experience of the second and third 
years, if not of the first, will prove that the thing is impossible. 
Revenue and protection must stand or fall together. The inter- 
ests of the government cannot be separated from the interests of 
the people ; and depend upon it. Sir, the party which attempts 
such a thing, will find that it has only separated itself from the 
people and the government both. 

And yet this proceeding is justified on the idea of lightening 
the burdens of the poor, and reducing the price of the necessa- 
ries of life to the laboring classes ! 

Mr. Chairman, if there be any thing against which the Amer- 
ican laborer ought to be on his guard, at this moment, it is the 
false sympathy, the hollow friendship, the killing kindness of 
men who are busying themselves about the cost of what he 
consumes, while they are cutting down the value of what he 



AND THE WAGES OF LABOR. 543 

earns ; of men who amuse him with delusive schemes for redu- 
cing his expenditures, while they are employed in diminishing 
his receipts ; of men who dangle the vision of cheaper food and 
cheaper clothing before his eyes, while they are in the very act 
of rifling his pocketbook. The whole art and part of certain 
gentlemen seems to be, to convince the workingman that the 
price of this or that article of his consumption is raised a few 
cents by the protecting system. As if the only subject of anx- 
iety with the free American laborer was, " what shall I eat, or 
what shall I drink, or wherewithal shall I be clothed ? " As if 
wages in this county were to be brought down to the standard 
of a bare and scanty subsistence I As if nothing was wanted 
by the laborer for the education of his children ; nothing for pay- 
ing his share of the support of religious worship; nothing to lay 
up, I do not say merely against a rainy day, but against that 
sunshiny day, which, by the blessing of God and a sound pro- 
tecting tariff, is sure to beam on every honest, industrious man 
among us, when he may enjoy the fruits of his toil in a condi- 
tion of comparative rest and recreation ! 

Reduce the wages of labor to the standard of mere subsist- 
ence, and the laborer must be a laborer always. The noble 
spectacle which is so often exhibited in this country, and so 
rarely in any other, and which, let me say to the honorable 
member from Louisiana, is quite as often exhibited in the region 
of the Eastern manufacturers as in any other part of the Union, 
of what are called self-made men, the printer's boys, or plough- 
boys, or mill-boys of a few years back, elevating themselves to 
the highest stations of social or of public life, will be seen no 
more. You have cut oft that hope of bettering his condition, 
which is the sweetest cordial to the heart of man, and the surest 
stimulus to industry, economy, and virtue. The one thing 
needful to the welfare of the laboring man, (temporally speaking, 
yet not without an incidental reference to things eternal,) is, that 
he should be able to lay up something. Ask any laborer what 
he thinks about the matter, and he will tell you that he cares 
not whether he pays a little more or a little less for his clothes ; 
that he is quite willing, if need be, to pay his brother laborer or 
his sister laborer a little more for making his shoes or making 



544 



THE WANTS OF THE GOVERNMENT 



his shirt, if you will secure to them both, not merely the means 
of paying for such things, but the means of making a little 
deposit, once in a week, or once in a month, or once in a quar- 
ter, in that most excellent of all institutions — the Savings 
Bank. 

Now, this is what the protective policy aims at ; and this, too, 
in spite of all assertions to the contrary, is what it accomplishes. 
Look at this table of the amount of deposits in the Savirtgs 
Bank at Lowell. 



In 1841 


448,190 dollars 


1842 


478,365 


1843 


462,650 " 


1844 


591,910 " 


1845 


730,890 " 



I have here similar tables, showing an increase of wages in 
the manufacturing establishments of New Hampshire and Mas- 
sachusetts, to the amount of twenty, thirty, forty, and even sixty 
per cent, in some cases, during the last three years. I have au- 
thentic information, too, that there has been a similar increase 
in some of the Maryland mills. And I have no doubt that 
other gentlemen will furnish similar testimony from other parts 
of the Union. And yet the Secretary of the Treasury has 
declared, that there has been no increase of wages at all, but 
rather a diminution, under the tariff of 18421 

This, Mr. Chairman, I repeat, is what the policy of protection 
aims at. It looks at the workingman, not in his mere brute 
capacity of a consumer, but in his higher nature of a producer. 
It looks not to reducing the price of what he eats or what he 
wears, but to keeping up the price of his own labor. It looks, 
in short, to wages first, wages last, wages altogether. Shall the 
wages of the whole civilized commercial world be equalized and 
levelled off? This is the briefest, truest, most concise and most 
comprehensive statement of the question between free trade and 
protection. The wages of labor — by which is to be understood 
not merely the wages which are paid by the capitalist to the 
hired hand, but the wages also which are earned by labor of any 
kind working on its own account — are now higher in this coun- 
try than in any other beneath the sun. If any body doubts this, 



AND THE WAGES OF LABOR. 545 

let him stop the first emigrant whom he meets in the street, and 
ask him why he came over here, what condition he left behind 
him, and in what circumstances he finds himself within six 
months after his arrival ? If any body doubts this, let him turn 
to the Parliamentary debaters, the economical essayists, or even 
the corn-law rhymers of England, and see what they say as to 
the condition of the great mass of British operatives. Listen 
to Charles Buller, in his admirable speech on systematic emi- 
gration as the only relief for the pauper labor of his country, 
w*hile he tells you " of human beings huddled together in defi- 
ance of comfort, of shame, and of health, in garrets and in cel- 
lars, and in the same hovels with their pigs ; of workhouses 
crowded ; of even the gaol resorted to for shelter and mainte- 
nance ; of human beings prevented from actually dying of star- 
vation in the open streets, or of others allowed to expire from 
inanition in the obscurity of their own dwelling-places." Listen 
to him, again, while he gives you an account " of thousands of 
men, women, and children, congregated together without any 
regard to decency or comfort in noisome sites and wretched 
hovels — of those wh*o wear out their lives in the darkness of 
coal and iron mines, doing what is commonly considered the 
work of brutes, in a moral and intellectual state hardly raised 
above that of the mere animal — of the shirt-makers, who get 
tenpence for making a dozen shirts — and of the fifteen thou- 
sand milliners in this metropolis, (London,) habitually working 
for the scantiest wages in close rooms, always for thirteen or 
fourteen hours a day, sometimes for days and nights together ; 
nine out of ten losing their health in the occupation, and scores 
of them falling victims to consumption, or rendered incurably 
blind whenever a court mourning, or any festivity of particular 
magnitude, tasks their powers more than usual." 

Listen to Samuel Laing, in his prize essay on the causes and 
remedies of the national distress, while he describes to you those 
eight thousand inhabited cellars in Liverpool, whose occupants 
are estimated at from thirty-five to forty thousand persons : 

" These cellars are dwellings under ground, in many cases having no windows, and 
no communication with the external air, excepting by the door, the top of which is 
sometimes not higher than the level of the street. When the door of such a cellar is 

46* 



546 THE WANTS OF THE GOVERNMENT 

closed, therefore, light and air are both excluded. The access to the door is often so 
low as not to admit of a person of moderate height standing upright, and there is fre- 
quently no floor of any kind except the bare earth." 

Go with him from the commercial to the manufacturing 
towns — to Manchester, Birmingham, and Leeds — and follow 
him from thence through the agricultural districts, and hear him 
conclude, as the sum of the whole survey, " that there is a large 
proportion of the laboring class who are unable to secure a toler- 
ably comfortable and stable existence in return for their labor, 
and are appro.ximating towards the gulf of pauperism." 

It may be. Sir,, that the wages of the skilled labor of England 
will be found to approach pretty nearly to those of the same 
class of labor in our own country ; though I remember finding 
an anecdote in the speech of a member of Parliament, not long 
ago, which conflicted even with this idea. In a debate on the 
corn-laws, a year or two since, Mr. P. Scrope is reported to have 
said, " that he had that evening met a manufacturer, who told 
him that he had last year discharged his foreman in consequence 
of not being able to pay him sufficient wages for the support of 
his family. That foreman had gone to America, and had writ- 
ten over to say that he was prosperous, that he was receiving 
double the wages he had had in England, while his expenditures 
and the price of provisions were two thirds less." 

Mr. Chairman, the fact is indisputable. The low price of 
land and its vast extent compared with the population, the vast 
amount of work to be done compared with the number of hands 
which can be commanded on our own soil to perform it, — these 
and other influences, secure now to American labor a remunera- 
tion which no other in the world receives. Shall this state of 
things, so fruitful of the greatest good to the greatest number, 
be continued ; or shall we, in a fit of universal benevolence, go 
in for a horizontal scale of wages, and an average condition of 
labor, the wide world over? Equality of earnings, equality of 
encouragements, equality of opportunities, privileges, and wages, 
throughout the length and breadth of our own land, no man 
would disturb. We desire the establishment of no system 
which shall benefit or build up one class of our industry, or one 
section of our country, at the expense of another. But cannot 



AND THE WAGES OF LABOR. 547 

our democracy be content with equality at home ? Is it anti- 
republican or anti- American, to maintain and protect the supe- 
rior condition of our own people? Cannot the frenzy of our 
philanthropy be appeased, until it has accomplished that univer- 
sal level of labor, which can only be reached by the prostration 
of our own ? Free trade says — no, to this question. The 
Secretary of the Treasury says — no. The bill before us says — 
no. Or if they do not dare to say so in terms, they propose 
and pursue a policy which leads to such a result, with the speed 
and the directness of a railroad. The policy of protection, on the 
other hand, says " yes, yes; it shall not be in vain to the work- 
ing-men of America, that their fathers threw off the colonial 
yoke, and secured for them a country and a government of their 
own. Other nations may well afford to enter into a free trade 
copartnership with us, for their labor has already reached that 
lowest depth to which there is no lower deep, and from which 
every change must be for the better. Other governments may 
afford to institute a free trade experiment on their own account, 
for they look to the intelligence, the education, and the inde- 
pendence of the few. But our institutions rest on the intelli- 
gence, education, and independence of the many. Our institu- 
tions rely on a condition of society, which nothing but a high 
rate of wages can maintain. If our labor be levelled off to the 
grade of European labor, our liberty must be cut down to the 
standard of European liberty. The government which looks to 
the laboring masses for support, must support the laboring 
masses." 

I may seem to have admitted, Mr. Chairman, in this view, 
that a protective tariff may raise the value of other things beside 
labor. Indeed, I expressly maintain, that it tends to secure a 
better price for agricultural produce, and that it is the only sys- 
tem which, in this country, can secure to that produce any price 
or market whatever. If gentlemen have any objection to this, 
let them tell it to the farmers. But as to the idea that it raises 
the price of the laboring man's clothes — it is utterly untrue. 
It has been proved again and again, by a hundred price-currents, 
that the effect of the protecting system has been to reduce, a 
hundredfold, the cost of the coarse articles of common wear. 



548 THE WANTS OF THE GOVERNMENT 

This whole hue-and-cry about higher duties on coarse goods is 
theoretic. It leaves out of consideration that domestic produc- 
tion which is not merely supplying our own market, but is send- 
ing thousands of bales of cotton cloth to Calcutta, in the face of 
a discriminating duty in favor of its British rival, and is exhibit- 
ing the truly oriental spectacle of British drills in American 
drillings! It is a fact, that the troops of the greatest cotton- 
manufacturing country in the world are wearing, on the plains 
of what was once the greatest cotton-growing country of the 
world, pantaloons and jackets made of American cotton and in 
American mills I Indeed, it is the exportation of these articles 
to Calcutta and China which has enabled some of the manu- 
facturers to make those great dividends of which we have heard 
so much. Now, every schoolboy must understand, that this 
export trade could not go on for an instant, unless the American 
drillings were cheaper and better than the British. 

Gentlemen on the other side rest all their arguments on the 
hypothesis that our laboring classes actually wear foreign cloth- 
ing. They seem to entertain the idea that the American laborer 
goes out to his work in the morning in a Manchester shirt, a 
London hat, and a Paris boot! And if he does not now, they 
are for making him do so at the earliest moment. What a 
picture! Why, an American working-man would not know 
himself in a looking-glass, in such an attire. Every body knows 
that we supply these things ourselves, and "supply them at a 
cheaper rate, and of a better quality, than others would supply 
them if there were no duty. And we can continue to do so, if 
we can only keep our own market to ourselves. But even if it 
were not so, even if the foreign fabrics of this sort could be pro- 
cured a few cents cheaper, I believe in my soul that the Ameri- 
can laborer would scorn such economy. The independent yeo- 
manry of this country will never again be content to be depend- 
ent on any other country for the manufacture and making up 
of their daily dress. They do not understand the democracy, 
the Americanism, of such wear. The farmers and mechanics 
are yet to declare themselves, who would not be willing to pay 
a cent or two more, either for their weekday jackets, or their 
.Sunday suits, for the sake of having them homemade. Such 



AND THE WAGES OF LABOR. 549 

clothes, if they were dearer at all, would be dearer in more 
senses of the word than one. They would be associated with 
that National Pride, of which, even the coldest abstractionist in 
these halls could not fail to have felt some touches, as he visited 
the late National Fair ; and which, though it may be derided by 
politicians and economists, is to the common heart above all 
calculations of moneyed value. They would be associated, too, 
with that National Independence, which was but half achieved 
by the arms of our Fathers, and which remains to be consum- 
mated by the arts of their sons. The workingmen of this coun- 
try, I verily believe, if interrogated upon such a point, would 
answer, as Benjamin Franklin answered at the bar of the Bri- 
tish House of Commons in the days of the Stamp- Act: 

" What used to be the pride of Americans ? " 

" To indulge in the fashions and manufactures of Great 
Britain." 

" What is now their pride ? " 

" To wear their old clothes over again, until they can make 
new ones for themselves." 

Mr. Chairman, there are many other points which I had pro- 
posed to touch, but I have only time to conclude with the fol- 
lowing propositions, which briefly embody all that I have said, 
and much that I would have said. 

I maintain, then : 

1. That provision ought promptly to be made for furnishing the government with 
whatever additional revenues and resources may be necessary for bringing the existing 
war with Mexico to a just and speedy conclusion, and establishing an honorable peace. 

2. That no additional revenue can be relied on from the bill now under considera- 
tion, either as originally reported, or with the modifications which have been proposed 
by the Secretary of the Treasury; but that, on the contrary, the whole experience of 
the country shows that the operation of such a bill would be materially to diminish 
the revenue. 

3. That this bill is, at best, a mere experiment, and one which, there is great reason 
to fear, would result in both curtailing the resources of the government, and crippling 
the industry of the people; and that in adopting an entire system of at/ valorem duties, 
it would open the door to all manner of inequalities and frauds, and would be espe- 
cially oppressive to the honest American merchant. 

4. That the tariff of 1842 has proved itself for three years past emphatically a reve- 
nue tariff; yielding, with signal uuiformity, and in precise correspondence with the 
calculations of its framers, a net average annual revenue of nearly twenty-seven mil 
lions of dollars, and at once protecting the labor and enriching the treasury of the 



550 THE WANTS OF THE GOVERNMENT AND THE WAGES OF LABOR. 

nation: and tliat no substantial modification — certainly no material reduction — of 
the duties wliich it imposes, would be likely to yield any thing like an equal amount to 
th6 government. 

5. That an issue of eight or ten millions of treasury notes, and the imposition of 
moderate specific duties on tea and coffee, for a short term of years, and for the sino-le 
purpose of defraying the expenses of the war, are tiie only measures for increasing the 
resources and revenues of the nation which can be adopted with any reasonable pros- 
pect of success ; and that, imless the administration and its friends intend to take the 
responsibility of resorting to direct taxation, or of incurring a large national debt, 
these measures ought to be adopted by them without delay. 



WHIG PREDICTIONS AND WHIG POLICY. 

A SPEECH DELIVERED AT THE STATE CONVENTION OF THE WHIGS OF 
MASSACHUSETTS, IX FANEUIL HALL, SEPTEMBER 23, J84G. 



I SHOULD have preferred on many accounts, Mr. President, to 
remain still longer a listener on this occasion, and to postpone 
until a later hour, if not altogether, any remarks of my own. 
But I cannot hesitate to respond, without further delay, to the 
unequivocal and cordial summons which has now been made 
upon me. Indeed, Sir, I am proud to participate, at any time, 
and in ever so humble a way, in the proceedings of such a meet- 
ing as I see before me. The mere presence at it, to those who 
have been so lately and so long confined to far other company, 
is a privilege which you and I, at least, know how to appreciate." 
I rejoice to see once more the faces of so many true-hearted 
Whigs of Massachusetts; — faces, not a few of which have been 
familiar to me in other years, and in other fields of public or 
political service ; — faces, all of which I may greet as the faces 
of friends, if there be any thing of truth in the saying of the 
great Roman orator, that one of the strongest bonds of human 
friendship is, " to think alike concerning the Republic." 

Nor, Sir, can I find it in my heart to regret that this Conven- 
tion is assembled here, in this city, covered with memorials of 
the patriotism of the fathers, and of the philanthropy and muni- 
ficence of their sons ; and in this hall, devoted, from the first, to 
human liberty, and whose echoes are ever true to the cause to 
which it was consecrated. And not of liberty alone, much less 

* Hon. Charles Hudson was in the Chair, having just returned with Mr. Winthrop 
from a protracted session of Congress. 



552 WHIG PREDICTIONS AND WHIG POLICY. 

of Boston alone, or of Massachusetts alone, do these venerated 
columns, or yonder votive canvas, speak to us, but of " Liberty 
and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable." 

We meet this day, Mr. President and Gentlemen, under cir- 
cumstances of more than ordinary interest. Rarely, if ever, have 
so many momentous issues been presented at once to our con- 
sideration. When we were assembled in this hall last year, the 
administration, against whose accession to power we had so 
vigorously but so vainly struggled, had but just entered on the 
threshold of their career. Their principles and purposes had only 
found expression on paper or in words, — in the resolutions of 
some Baltimore convention, in the manifestoes of some mass 
meeting, or in the hardly more dignified phrases of an inaugural 
message. We had, then, some reason, or at least some room, for 
hoping, that their practice might fall short of their profession's ; 
that their bite might be less bad than their bark; that they might 
not be quite willing, or if willing, not quite able, to carry out to 
their full consummation the plans they had so boldly avowed. 

A year of action has since ensued ; a year of busy, earnest, 
varied, crowded, action. Their whole policy has now been prac- 
tically disclosed and developed. There is scarcely a subject in 
the whole wide field of national legislation, which has failed to 
receive the impression, the deep and strong impression, of their 
ruling hand. Questions foreign and questions domestic, ques- 
tions of currency and questions of commerce, questions moral 
and questions material, questions of peace and questions of 
war, questions of labor and questions of liberty, have been 
drawn, with startling rapidity, within the sphere of their delibe- 
ration, and have received the unequivocal stamp of their deci- 
sion. 

Their acts are now before us. We now know them by their 
fruits. And it well becomes us. to examine those fruits, and to 
see for whom they are meat, and for whom they are poison. 

In pursuing such an examination ever so cursorily, Mr. Presi- 
dent, no man who hears me can fail to be struck with the com- 
plete coincidence which is found, between the predictions which 
were pronounced by the Whig presses and the Whig speakers, 
two years ago, as to the consequences of Mr. Polk's election to 



WHIG PREDICTIONS AND WHIG POLICY. 553 

the Presidency, and the facts as they have now occurred. A 
great poet tells us of — 

" Some juggling fiend, who never spoke before, 
But cries, ' I warned thee,' when the deed is o'er." 

Not such are the cries, "we warned you," "we warned you," 
which the Whigs are now everywhere ringing through the land. 
In the columns of a hundred newspapers, at the corners of a 
hundred streets, the precise results which are now before us and 
upon us, were read or heard two years ago, in the language of 
prophecy, but, as it now appears, with the literal exactness of 
history. We may, indeed, say with him of old, not a little of 
whose patience we are called upon to exercise, "the things which 
we greatly feared are come upon us, and that which we were 
afraid of is come unto us." 

I know, Mr. President, of but a single catastrophe, which was 
foreboded as the consequence of the defeat of our party at the 
last Presidential election, which has been in any degree averted. 
I mean, a war with Great Britain for the Territory of Oregon. 
And certainly, certainly, I do not underrate the importance of 
this exception to the general assertion I have made. Nor would 
I withhold from the administration any measure of credit, which 
it may deserve, for having saved the country from so unspeakable 
a calamity. But what degree of credit does it deserve ? Who 
can say, this day, upon his conscience, that it was by the states- 
manship, by the moderation, by the wisdom, by the civilized 
policy and Christian principle of the President, or his cabinet, 
or the general mass of his supporters, that this result was accom- 
plished? Who, on the other hand, can forget the intemperate 
and braggart counsels, which brought the two countries to the 
perilous edge of such a war as never raged before, and which 
were only restrained, (under God,) by the patriotic firmness and 
independence of half a dozen of the nominal friends of the ad- 
ministration, seconded and sustained by the great body of the 
Whigs in Congress? Yes, Sir, the Whigs in Congress, and 
more particularly the Whigs of the Senate, with our own ever- 
honored and illustrious Daniel Webster in their front ranks, 
may claim the true glory of having saved the peace of the 
country and of the world, in this case ; and of having brought 



554 WHIG PREDICTIONS AND WHIG POLICY. 

the administration to the necessity, (I will not call it the humili- 
ating necessity, — there is nothing humiliating in abandoning a 
false course, — it is the highest honor, rather, to any man or any 
party,) of submitting to an arrangement, to which it had rashly 
and recklessly declared that it never would submit! 

Peace, lasting, and, I hope, eternal peace, between the United 
States and Great Britain, by the settlement of the only remain- 
ing disputed boundary between them, — that very peace, which 
Shakspearc would seem to have prefigured, when he said, " Our 
peace shall stand as firm as Rocky Moinitains,^^ — this has been 
secured to us ; and, for this, the Whigs in Congress, in a hope- 
less minority though they seemed, may claim no second or sub- 
ordinate share of distinction. Had they looked only to party 
ends ; had they been willing to embroil the country, for the pur- 
pose of embarrassing the administration ; had they acted in the 
spirit, which so many of their adversaries have more than once 
exhibited in regard to the Ashburton Treaty, I honestly believe 
that war would have been as inevitable, even as General Cass 
so often pronounced it. But the policy of the Whigs was Peace ; 
peace in this case, and peace in every other case. And I may 
add, that they would have preserved it in every other case, also, 
had it ever depended on their voices or on their votes. 

But, with this one exception, the whole catalogue of disas- 
trous consequences, predicted from the election of Mr. Polk, has 
been fulfilled to the letter. 

1. The Sub-Treasury scheme, upon which the people of this 
country passed sentence of condemnation, in tones so emphatic 
and unequivocal, in 1840, has been reestablished. That credit 
system, upon which the young and enterprising must ever 
depend so much for getting a start in life, and which, under 
wholesome regulations, is of incalculable importance to the 
honest industry of the people, has again been placed under the 
ban of the national government. From this day forth, every 
bank-note in the land, without discrimination between the 
redeemable and the irredeemable, bears a government protest on 
its face. It may be good enough for the people, but it is not 
good enough for the office-holders. A new divorce has been 
proclaimed between the people and the government, and the 



WHIG PllEDICTIONS AND WHIG POLICY. 555 

decree does not contain even an allowance for alimony. " Let 
the government take care of itself, and let the people take care 
of themselves," is again practically avowed as the maxim of a 
self-styled Democratic administration. 

It is true, that the administration haSy at present, the hard- 
est part of this bargain. It is clear that the government has 
not yet made much headway in taking care of number one, 
upon this hard money principle. Not only has the Sub-Trea- 
sury system been again ushered into existence under the salute of 
an issue of ten millions of treasury notes, but the Executive has 
notoriously been at work in manufacturing another variety of 
paper money, through the medium of paymasters' drafts, which 
is a deliberate and intentional fraud upon the whole design and 
object of the act. But the principle is none the better, whatever 
the practice may be. This government was not made to take 
care of itself alone ; and as to the people, the best and only way 
in which they can take care of themselves — as I trust they will 
soon understand and signify — is by placing always in offices of 
authority and trust, men who will watch over their interests, 
provide for their wants, regulate their commerce, protect their 
labor, and carry out those great ends of common defence and 
general welfare, for which the Constitution was at first created. 

2. In fit companionship with this act, may be placed the 
refusal of the administration, through a most odious exercise of 
the veto power, to cooperate with large majorities of Congress, 
in making provision for removing obstructions and improving 
channels in the various harbors and rivers of the Union. We of 
Massachusetts, had a particular interest in the bill which was 
thus wantonly defeated. The harbor, on whose borders we 
are at this moment assembled, was deprived, by the imperious 
will of Mr. Polk, of an appropriation, essential, not so much 
to its improvement, as to its preservation, and almost to its ex- 
istence. Mr. President, the day was, when no man would have 
dared to deny that the condition of Boston harbor was a mat- 
ter of national concern. When the British government shut up 
Boston port by a tyrannical edict, the whole Union was roused 
to reopen it. When the Liberty Boys choked up the channel 
with British tea, that, too, was an obstruction which was not 



556 WHIG PREDICTIONS AND WHIG POLICY. 

counted altogether local. Nor did it ever enter into the head of 
any of our Revolutionary or Constitutional fathers, to deny the 
nationality of so important a thoroughfare of commerce. But 
other counsels have come over our government, and Boston and 
Massachusetts are almost ruled out of the national regard. 

Not, however, for ourselves alone, or even most deeply, do we 
deplore the veto of the Harbor and River bill. We realize every 
day, more and more, that we have a common interest and a 
common destiny with the dwellers on the great lakes and rivers 
of the West and Southwest, and our hearts are with them, in 
this fresh and cruel postponement of their long-deferred hopes. I 
know of few things more justly calculated to rouse the West 
and North to vigorous and united political action, than their 
common want of a systematic prosecution of these river and 
harbor improvements. The newspapers informed us that the 
flags on the shipping of Lake Erie were displayed at half-mast, 
when the news of the veto reached Buffalo. And well might 
they be so displayed. Not a few valuable lives are to be sacri- 
ficed, not a few hardy mariners are doomed to a watery grave, 
by that arbitrary act. It would be but a fit mark of the national 
mourning and indignation, if all the commercial flags of the 
Union, in all our ports, on all our rivers, and on all our lakes, 
should be displayed at half-mast, with the cause of such a pro- 
ceeding briefly labelled on their folds, from this time forth, until 
a President shall be elected, who will sign the very bill which 
has now, for the third time, been rejected. 

3. But a heavier blow still has fallen on the trade and indus- 
try of the country. In conformity with our predictions, the 
tariff" of 1842 has been repealed, and a new one enacted 
in its stead. The character of this new tariff" has been so ably 
and clearly exposed elsewhere, by those whose words are 
never lost on the country, that it would be a waste of time to 
enter here upon any elaborate analysis of its elements. This 
much, however, should be everywhere, and on all occasions, 
asserted of it. Its passage constitutes a complete revolution in 
our whole revenue and financial system. It is a measure which 
has no precedent in our own history, or in the history of civilized 
commercial countries. Its exclusive adoption of ad valorem 



WHIG PREDICTIONS AND AVHIG POLICY. 557 

duties is in direct defiance of all the example and authority of 
other nations, and of all our own experience. It is in this 
respect a mere experiment, and one which is to be wantonly 
tried, at the expense of the interests of morality, as well as of 
trade. And in other respects, even more important, it is con- 
trary to the whole policy of our government, from the earliest 
day of its establishment. 

Sir, the professed aim and object of this new tariff, is to elim- 
inate from our revenue system that element of discrimination in 
favor of American labor, which has been intertwined with it from 
the 4th day of July, 1789, to the 4th day of August, 1846. 
Henceforth the workingman of America is to have no protection 
from his own government. Henceforth (if these counsels hold, 
as I rejoice to believe they cannot,) he is to be doomed to an 
unaided struggle for bread, and almost for breath, with the 
operatives of the old world. The great free trade doctrine, that 
we are to " buy where we can buy cheapest," is to be rigorously 
applied to human labor, and wages are to be conformed to the 
standard of the cheapest markets of England, France and Ger- 
many. Such a system as this might naturally receive some 
countenance among those, with whom labor is associated only 
with the idea of degradation and bondage, and with whom 
the laborer himself is a thing to be bought and sold in the 
shambles. Though, let me do the justice to acknowledge, 
there are large and rapidly increasing numbers of intelligent 
Southern Whigs, who scorn such views as much as we do, and 
who appreciate, as highly as ourselves, the demands of the free 
labor of the country. But how such a system should receive the 
support of Northern and Western men, except upon the merest 
and most unworthy political and party grounds, is a matter 
past all comprehension. Yet so it is ; and New York, New Hamp- 
shire, Ohio, Indiana, and other free States, are jointly responsible 
with Virginia, South Carolina, Mississippi and Alabama, for the 
passage of the tariff of 1846. Sir, I will extenuate nothing of 
the bad influences of Southern institutions. If railing against 
them would annihilate them, I would touch no other theme, even 
to the going down of the sun. But neither will I set down 
aught in malice. And it cannot be denied, that not a few of 
47* 



558 WHIG PREDICTIONS AND WHIG POLICY. 

the Northern, Eastern and Western States must be regenerated, 
before we can justly lay the whole abomination of this system 
at the doors of slavery. 

Mr. President, it is Party which has done this work. The self- 
styled Democracy of the country pledged itself long ago to its 
accomplishment, and has now fulfilled its pledges, in spite of all 
personal convictions. Where was there a voice raised in full, 
cordial, unequivocal approbation of this new tariff? Nowhere on 
this side of the Atlantic. Nowhere within the wide-spread limits 
of our own Republic. When Senators were called on to explain 
and defend the details of the new system, they all with one con- 
sent began to make excuses, or else stood mute. One resigned, 
rather than vote for it. Another was gazetted as having at- 
tempted to run away, rather than vote for it. Mr. Benton 
admitted that he dared not look at what he was doing. Mr. 
Calhoun, even, was understood to have expressed the strongest 
misgivings as to its present policy. The casting vote was given 
at one stage by a Vice-President, and at another by an instructed 
Whig, (I wish he had been better instructed,) who both acknow- 
ledged their personal judgments to be against the measure. 
No, Sir, the voices that hail the passage of this Democratic 
Tariff come all from beyond the seas. The only indorsement 
of the Report on which it was based, was from the Parhament 
of Great Britain, and almost the only rejoicings at its passage 
are from the people of Great Britain. And well may it be so. 
So far as commerce and trade are concerned, it goes far to 
reestablish the old colonial relations between us. They are 
henceforth, as in the days before the Revolution, to take our raw 
materials, or such of them as they cannot get cheaper elsewhere, 
and to send them back to us with their own skill and industry 
added to them. As for our own labor, it may hew w^ood and 
draw water, and whistle for a living. 

There are other views of this measure, of deep national con- 
cern. It may be destructive of revenue. It will involve us in a 
national debt. It will bring upon us the necessity of direct 
taxation. But these, in my judgment, are trifles light as air, 
compared with its influence on the destinies of American labor. 

Read, Mr. President, the account of English labor recently 



WHIG PREDICTIONS AND WHIG POLICY. 559 

furnished us by your own amiable and excellent fellow-citizen, 
of Worcester county, Eliliu Burritt; Go with him into the 
work-shop of the British blacksmith. See the father working 
"from four o'clock in the morning to ten o'clock at night to earn 
eighteen pence " — " his wages averaging only about seven shil- 
lings a week," and that to support a " family of five." See his 
eldest boy of only nine years of age, cut off from all opportunity, 
alike of intellectual or physical expansion, with no food for the 
mind, and not enough for the body, working wearily by his side, 
to eke out the number of nails pei' diem, which is to secure them 
all from starvation. Hear the father lamenting, that he had no 
time or means to teach his children to read the Testament, the 
only book which he had ever seen himself, or which he seemed 
to care to have them see I 

And this is the sort of labor, with which (according to the 
resolutions of the Democratic Convention held in this Hall last 
week) it is an insult to suggest, that the American operative is 
not able and ready to compete successfully I Is it not plain, that 
if the American operative is to compete with it successfully and 
without protection, it must be by submitting to these same 
deprivations and hardships? And are our laborers to work 
eighteen hours for eighteen pence ? Is seven shillings a week 
the Democratic standard of sufficiency, for a laborer's family of 
five ? And are the children of our American laborers to be 
doomed to toil by their father's side, from nine years old and 
upwards, shut out from all opportunity of being taught even to 
read the Testament ? 

What is to become of the Manhood, the Education, the 
Morality, the Eeligion, the Liberty of this Country — for they 
are all bound up in one bundle of life together — when such a 
state of things shall exist among us ? Where would have been 
our blacksmiths' boys, if it had existed heretofore? Not travel- 
ling in Europe, like Elihu Burritt, able to read the Testament in 
a hundred tongues. Not governing Massachusetts, with admi- 
rable ability and discretion, like George N. Briggs. Sir, in every 
view of Philanthropy, Morality, Humanity, Republicanism, Li- 
berty, it is of an importance w^hich cannot be over-stated, that 
the wages of labor should be kept from falling to the English 



560 WHIG PREDICTIONS AND WHIG TOLICY. 

or the European standard. And to this end, there must be pro- 
tection, discrimination, or whatever else you choose to call it. 
We care not about words, but things. We do not stickle about 
the precise provisions of the Tariff of '42. But the Whigs of 
the Union will, I trust, leave no step untaken, and no stone 
unturned, to restore to our Revenue system that great principle 
of discrimination in favor of American labor, which our fathers 
established, as among the first and best fruits of their revolution- 
ary success ; and which has now, for the first time in our history, 
been totally discarded. 

4, I come, Mr. President, to a brief notice of the last, but by 
no means the least momentous, fulfilment of the Whig predic- 
tions of 1844. It was the distinct declaration of all the Whig 
organs, during the last Presidential canvass, that the annexation 
of Texas would involve this nation in war with Mexico. And 
it has done so. 

I do not forget that, in regard to some incidental questions 
connected with this war, there have been differences of opinion 
among friends at home, and differences of votes among friends at 
Washington. Upon these topics of controversy, however, I do 
not intend to touch. If anybody has come here, either by direct 
expression or by covert allusion, to cast imputations, to provoke 
collisions, or to stir up strife, I pass him by, with whatever 
respect other people may think him entitled to.* We are assem- 
bled. Sir, to remember our agreements and not our differences. 
We have come here to reconcile all differences, and to do what 
we can to sustain and advance our common principles and our 
common objects. Let me only say, that, if the differences 
among Whigs here, be no wider than those among Whigs at 
Washington, on this subject, a reconciliation will require but little 
expenditure either of time or words. You and I, Sir, certainly, 
when we came to different conclusions as to our duty, on a 
memorable occasion, never imagined that we were parting com- 
pany for an instant, either as true Whigs, or as true friends of 
peace on the one side, or true defenders of the country on the 
other. Much less did we dream, that we were forfeiting any 

* See Note at the end of the volume. 



WHIG PREDICTIONS AND WHIG POLICY. 561 

thing of our mutual respect and confidence. Nor have we 
done so. 

Sir, upon all the great points of this question, there is no dif- 
ference of opinion whatever. All agree, that this war ought 
never to have been commenced. All agree, that it ought to be 
brought to a close, at the earliest practicable moment. No man 
present denies that it originated, primarily, in the annexation of 
Texas ; and, secondarily, in the marching of the American army 
into the disputed territory beyond the Nueces. And no man 
present fails to deplore, and to condemn, both of these measures. 
Nor is there a Whig in this assembly, nor, in my opinion, a 
Whig throughout the Union, who does not deprecate, from the 
bottom of his heart, any prosecution of this war, for the purpose 
of aggression, invasion, or conquest. 

This, this is the matter in which we take the deepest con- 
cern this day. Where, when, is this war to end, and what are 
to be its fruits? Unquestionably, we are not to forget that 
it takes two to make a bargain. Unquestionably, we are not to 
forget that Mexico must be willing to negotiate, before our own 
government can be held wholly responsible for the failure of a 
treaty of peace. I rejoice, for one, that the administration have 
shown what little readiness they have shown, for bringing the 
war to a conclusion. I have given them credit elsewhere, for 
their original overtures last autumn ; and I shall not deny them 
whatever credit they deserve for their renewed overtures now. 
But, Mr. President, it is not every thing which takes the name 
or the form of an overture of peace, which is entitled to respect 
as such. If it proposes unjust and unreasonable terms ; if it 
manifests an overbearing and oppressive spirit ; if it presumes 
on the power of those who make it, or on the weakness of those 
to whom it is offered, to exact hard and heartless conditions ; if. 
especially, it be of a character at once offensive and injurious to 
the rights of one of the nations concerned, and to the principles 
of a large majority of the other; — then it prostitutes the name 
of peace, and its authors are only entitled to the contempt 
which belongs to those who add hypocrisy to injustice. 

When the President of the United States, on a sudden and 
serious emergency, demanded of Congress the means of meet- 



562 AVniG PREDICTIONS AND WHia POLICY. 

ing a war, into which he had ah-eady plunged the country, he 
pledged himself, in thrice repeated terms, to be ready at all 
times to settle the existing disputes between us and Mexico, 
whenever Mexico should be willing to make, or to receive 
propositions to that end. To that pledge he stands solemnly 
recorded in the sight of God and of men. Now, Sir, it was no 
part of our existing disputes, at that time, whether we should 
have possession of California, or of any other territory beyond 
the Rio Grande. And the President, in prosecuting plans of 
invasion and conquest, which look to the permanent acquisition 
of any such territories, will be as false to his own pledges, as he 
is to the honor and interests of his countrv. 

I believe that I speak the sentiments of the whole people of 
Massachusetts — I know I speak my own — in saying that we 
want no more territorial possessions, to become the nurseries of 
new slave States. It goes hard enough with us, that the men 
and money of the nation should be employed for the defence of 
such acquisitions, already made ; but to originate new enterprises 
for extending the area of slavery by force of arms, is revolting 
to the moral sense of every American freeman. 

Sir, I trust there is no man here, who is not ready to stand by 
the Constitution of the country. I trust there is no man here 
who is not willing to hold fast to the Union of the States, be its 
limits ultimately fixed a little on one side, or a little on the other 
side, of the line of his own choice. For myself, I will not con- 
template the idea of the dissolution of the Union, in any 
conceivable event. There are no boundaries of sea or land, of 
rock or river, of desert or mountain, to which I will not*try, at 
least, to carry out my love of country, whenever they shall really 
be the boundaries of my country. If the day of dissolution 
ever comes, it shall bring the evidence of its own irresistible 
necessity with it. I avert my eyes from all recognition of such 
a necessity in the distance. Nor am I ready for any political 
organizations or platforms, less broad and comprehensive than 
those which may include and uphold the whole Whig party of 
the United States. But all this is consistent, and shall, in my 
own case, practically consist, with a just sense of the evils of 
slavery ; with an earnest opposition to every thing designed to 



WHIG PREDICTIONS AND WHIG POLICY. 563 

prolong or extend it ; with a firm resistance to all its encroach- 
ments on Northern rights ; and above all, with an uncompro- 
mising hostility to all measures for introducing new slave States 
and new slave territories into our Union. 

To this, then, let us pledge our united and cordial efforts. Let 
us call on the Executive to conform strictly to his pledges as to 
the present war. Let us demand of him to desist from all 
schemes of aggression and conquest. Let us demand of him 
not inconsiderately to reject the proffered mediation of Great 
Britain, and at any rate to confine all his military movements to 
the one great end of securing the restoration of peace. Let us, 
above all things, protest, in language not to be mistaken, against, 
all measures which shall add another inch of slave-holding terri- 
tory to the Union. In the vote of the House of Representatives 
of the United States, on the 8th of August last, we have a sign 
of the times, and of the spirit of the times, full of encourage- 
ment. In that sign, let us go on and conquer. 

Massachusetts Whigs cannot fail to conquer, Mr. President, 
with this and the other great issues to which I have alluded, in 
fit conjunction before them. With good candidates, and in a 
good cause, they have shown themselves to be all but invincible. 
Never had they better candidates, — never a better cause, than 
now ; and nothing is wanting to their entire and triumphant 
success, but those united, vigorous, determined efforts, which the 
spirit of this meeting assures me will be made. 



THE WAE WITH MEXICO. 



A SrEECH DELIVEP.ED IX THE HOL'SE OF REPRESENTATIVES OP THE 
UNITED STATES, IN COMMITTEE OF THE WHOLE ON THE STATE OF 
THE UNION, JANUARY 8, 1647. 



If I could have selected my own time for addressing the 
committee, I would not have followed so closely in the wake of 
my honorable and excellent friend from Georgia, (INIr. Toombs.) 
who has just taken his seat. But, after watching and strug- 
gling for the floor for three or four days, I cannot forego the 
opportunity of saying what I have to say now, even to avoid 
the disadvantage of placing my remarks in immediate contrast 
with a speech, which has attracted so large a measure of atten- 
tion and admiration. 

I am not prepared to vote for the bill now under considera- 
tion. I certainly cannot vote for it in its present shape. I 
doubt whether I can be brought to vote for it in any shape, 
under the present circumstances of the country. But, before 
dealing with its particular provisions, or with the principles and 
policy which it involves, I desire to submit a few considerations 
of a more general and comprehensive character. 

I am not one of those, Mr. Chairman — if, indeed, there be 
any such in this House — who think it incumbent on them to 
vote against all supplies in a time of war, because they do not 
approve the manner in which the war was commenced, or the 
spirit in which it is conducted. Regarding war as an evil which 
no language can exaggerate ; deprecating nothing more earn- 
estly than a necessity of rendering myself in any degree respon- 
sible for its existence or continuance ; desiring nothing so sin- 
cerely as an opportunity of contributing in any way to the peace 



THE WAR WITH MEXICO. 565 

of my country and of the world ; I yet acknowledge that there 
are many cases in which I should feel constrained to vote men 
and money for prosecuting hostilities, even though they had 
originated in measures which I utterly condemned. I may say, 
in a word, and without further specification, that I am ready to 
vote for the defence of my country, now and always ; and, when 
a foreign army is on our borders, or a foreign squadron in our 
bays, I shall never be for stopping to inquire into the merits of 
the quarrel, or to ascertain who struck, or who provoked, the first 
blow, before doing whatever it may be in my power to do, to 
drive back the invaders, and to vindicate the inviolability of our 
soil. Nor do I forget that it may be sometimes necessary for 
our defence to carry the war into the enemy's country, and to 
cripple the resources, and crush the power, of those who may 
insist on disturbing our peace. When such a necessity exists, 
and is clearly manifested, I shall not shrink from meeting its 
responsibilities. 

And here, Mr. Chairman, let me say to the honorable mem- 
ber from Ohio, (Mr. Giddings,) that I cannot acknowledge the 
entire applicability to the present issue, of those British prece- 
dents which he held up for our imitation a few days ago. I am 
not ready to admit that there is any very close analogy between 
the struffojle of the American colonies in 1776, and that of the 



"&& 



Mexicans now. Still less analogy is there between a vote of 
the British House of Commons, and a vote of the American 
House of Representatives. A refusal of supplies in the Parlia- 
ment of Great Britain is, generally speaking, equivalent to a 
change of administration. No British Ministry can hold their 
places in defiance of such a vote. A successful opposition to 
supplies in time of war, is thus almost certain to result in bring- 
ing forthwith into power a Ministry opposed to its further prose- 
cution ; and the kingdom is not left to encounter the dangers 
which might result from a conflict, upon such a subject, between 
the executive and the legislative authorities. It is not so here. 
No vote of Congress can change our administration. If it could, 
the present administration would have expired on Saturday last, 
when a tax, which they had solemnly declared was essential to 
furnish them with the sinews of war, was so emphatically de- 

48 



566 THE WAR WITH MEXICO. 

nied. If it could, the present administration would have gone 
out on Tuesday last, when their demand for a Lieutenant-Gene- 
ral, was so unceremoniously laid on the table. No British Min- 
istry, in these days, could have survived for an hour two such 
signal defeats. 

But our Executive is elected for a terra of years, and his 
Cabinet are quite independent of our votes. A refusal of all 
supplies might hamper and embarrass an Executive, and give 
an enemy the advantage of divided counsels, but could hardly 
enforce a change of policy, or secure a concerted action in favor 
of peace. Certainly, it does not seem to be the mode contem- 
plated by our Constitution for putting an end to a war, when it 
has once been commenced. The people alone can apply the 
potent styptic, the magical Brocchieri, for stopping the effusion of 
blood, if it be the Executive will that blood shall continue to flow. 
It is their prerogative to change the administration, and the day 
is coming, though farther off" than some of us might wish, when 
they will have the opportunity of exercising it. 

While, therefore, Sir, I yield to no one in admiration of the 
illustrious statesmen of Old England, whose names have been 
introduced into this debate — Burke, Barre, Fox, and Chatham 
— and honor them especially for their noble efforts in behalf of 
American rights, I do not see my way clear to making their 
conduct in the British Parliament in 1776, the exact model of 
my own conduct here and now. I turn rather to the example 
and authority of American statesmen, hardly less distinguished, 
and no less worthy of admiration and imitation. If ever there 
was a man of pure life, of stern integrity, of exalted patriotism 
in our country, it was John Jay; a member of the first Congress 
of the United States, and the author of one of those masterly 
papers, emanating from that body, which called forth the well- 
remembered commendation of Lord Chatham himself: the first 
Chief Justice of the United States, and of whom it has been 
beautifully said, that " when the spotless ermine of the judicial 
robe fell on John Jay, it touched nothing not as spotless as 
itself." He was no friend to war in general, or to the last war 
in which this country was involved in particular. But in writ- 
ing to a kindred spirit during the existence of that war, he ex- 



THE WAR WITH MEXICO. 567 

pressed sentiments in which I so heartily concur, that I cannot 
forbear reading them to the committee : 

JOHN JAY TO TIMOTHY PICKERING. 

"Bedford, November 1, 1814. 

" It is not clear to me that Britain did then expect or desire to conclude the war 
quite so soon. As to her present or future disposition to peace, or how far it has been, 
or may be affected by a settled or by a still fluctuating state of things in Europe, or 
by calculations of our becoming more united or more divided, cannot now be known. 
If we should change our rulers, and fill their places with men free from blame, the 
restoration of peace might doubtless be more easily accomplished. Such a change 
will come ; but not while the prevailing popular delusion continues to deceive and 
mislead so great a portion of our citizens. 

" Things being as they are, I think we cannot be too perfectly united in a determi- 
nation to defend our country, nor be too vigilant in watching and resolutely examin- 
ing the conduct of the administration in all its departments, candidly and openly 
giving decided approbation or decided censure, according as it may deserve the one or 
the other." 

Mr. Giddings. Will my friend from Massachusetts permit 
me to offer one word of explanation ? 

The Speaker. Does the gentleman from Massachusetts yield 
the floor? 

Mr. Winthrop. Certainly, Sir. 

Mr. Giddings. The gentleman from Massachusetts will dis- 
tinctly understand that, in so many words, I expressed the opin- 
ion that, if the army should be withdrawn within the legiti- 
mate limits of the United States, there would be but one voice 
in the country in favor of a war to repel invasion. 

Mr. Winthrop. I cheerfully give the gentleman from Ohio 
the benefit of the explanation, and had not the slightest inten- 
tion of casting any reflection upon his conduct. 

Sir, I concur entirely in both the propositions contained in 
this paragraph which I have just read from the correspondence 
of Mr. Jay. I think " we cannot be too perfectly united in a 
determination to defend our country," wherever that defence 
may be involved, directly or indirectly, in this war and in all 
other wars; and I think that " we cannot be too vigilant either 
in watching and resolutely examining the conduct of the Ad- 
ministration in all its departments, candidly and openly giving 
decided approbation or decided censure, according as it may 
deserve the one or the other." For, while I am not willing to class 



568 THE WAR WITH MEXICO. 

myself with those who are for refusing all supplies, even under 
the present circumstances of the war in which we are engaged ; 
while I maintain that some provision must be made for the 
support of our armies and the defence of our country, as long 
as a foreign nation is in arms against us, declining all overtures 
of peace ; I must also disavow all sympathy with those who 
proclaim their intention to sanction all the measures of the 
Administration, blindly and implicitly, and to vote for whatever 
amount of money, and whatever number of men, they may see 
fit to demand. I cannot regard such a course as either called 
for by patriotism or consistent with principle. Still less do I 
acquiesce in the doctrine, which would impose silence upon all 
who cannot approve the conduct and policy of the Administra- 
tion. I have no faith in the idea that it is necessary for us to 
hold our peace, in order that the Executive may make peace 
with Mexico. I believe, on the contrary, that, if this war is ever 
to be brought to an end, it is time for those who desire that con- 
summation, to speak out in language not to be misunderstood. 

Indeed, Sir, I know of nothing of less favorable augury for 
the destinies of our country, than the disposition which has 
been manifested by the Administration and its friends to stifle 
inquiry, to suppress discussion, to overawe every thing like free 
comment and criticism, in regard to the war in which we are 
now involved. 

When any one of the vessels of our Navy meets with a dis- 
aster at sea, is wrecked in a gale, or stranded on a lee-shore, a 
court of inquiry is forthwith instituted as to the circumstances 
of the catastrophe. Her officers demand it. The Government 
exact it. It is considered due to the country, as well as to all 
concerned, that it should be clearly seen whether there has been 
any carelessness, or any culpableness, on the part of any of those 
to whom she has been intrusted ; and, if so, who is the guilty 
party. 

But now, when the ship of State has been involved in the 
deepest disaster which can befall her, when she has been ar- 
rested on that track of tranquil liberty for which she was de- 
signed, and has been plunged into the vortex of foreign war, we 
find her commander and his officers and pilots all denouncing 



THE WAR WITH MEXICO. 569 

any investigation of their conduct, and imperiously demanding 
of the people and their representatives that they shall rest satis- 
fied with a one-sided, ex parte vindication of their acts and 
motives. All denial, all doubt, of the supreme wisdom and con- 
summate justice of their conduct is boldly condemned from the 
very quarter-deck itself, not without ominous glances at the yard- 
arm ; and those who honestly entertain misgivings as to their 
course, are called upon to close their lips, or to submit to the 
base imputation of "giving aid and comfort to the enemy." 

Sir, if this be an evidence of the progress of Democracy, it 
can only be of that sort of Democracy which is to find its legiti- 
mate goal in despotism. If such a doctrine is to receive the 
sanction of this House, we had better resort to the old custom 
of the British Parliament, and send our Speaker, at the opening 
of every Congress, to the President, to beg that he will graciously 
grant to his most faithful Commons the privilege of free debate. 
Nay, we might as well resort at once to the old Roman practice, 
in time of war, and invest our Chief Magistrate with the irre- 
sponsible prerogative of the Dictatorship, and leave him alone to 
take care that the Republic receives no detriment. 

We are gravely told that we may question the policy and 
justice of an administration in time of peace as much as we 
please; but that when we are engaged in war, all such ques- 
tioning is unpatriotic and treasonable. So, then, Mr. Chairman, 
if the rulers of our Republic shall content themselves with some 
ordinary measure of misconduct, with some cheap and vulgar 
misdemeanor, the people may arraign and impeach them to 
their heart's content. But let them only lift themselves boldly 
to the perpetration of a flagrant crime, let them only dare to 
commit the very worst act of which they are capable, and they 
are to find their impunity in the very enormity of their conduct, 
and are to be safely screened behind the mountain of their own 
misdoing I 

This, Sir, is the length to which the President has gone in his 
message. This is the length to which gentlemen have followed 
him on this floor. Be it, say they, that this war is, in your 
judgment, wholly unjustifiable ; be it, that it has been commenced 
by Executive assumption and usurpation ; be it, that it is prose- 
48* 



570 THE WAR WITH MEXICO. 

cuted in a manner utterly inconsistent with tlie Constitution of 
our country ; yet, as it is a war, and for the very reason that it 
is this monstrous wrong, you must not open your lips ; you must 
not express or intimate opposition or discontent; you must not 
inquire, discuss, or do any thing but vote supplies for its vigor- 
ous prosecution. The enemy will hear you, and will derive 
« aid and comfort " from your conduct, and you yourselves will 
be guilty of treason. 

Sir, I say, let the enemy hear — let the enemy hear, and let 
the world hear, all that we say and all that we think on this 
subject, rather than our rights of free discussion shall be thus 
wrenched from us, and rather than the principles of our Consti- 
tution and the spirit of our government shall thus be subverted 
and crushed. 

Mr. Chairman, I can find no words strong enough to express 
my utter reprobation and condemnation of this abhorrent doc- 
trine. The doctrine that, whenever war exists, whether pro- 
duced by the acts of others or by our own act, the Representa- 
tives of the people are to resign all discretion and discrimination 
as to the measures by which, and the objects for which, it is to 
be carried on I The doctrine that, in time of war, we are bound 
by the obligations of patriotism to throw the reins on the neclc 
of Executive power, and let it prance and plunge according to 
its own wild and ungoverned impulses! I have heard before of 
standing by one's country right or wrong, and much as we may 
scorn such a sentiment as a general principle, there is at least 
one sense in which no man is at liberty to revolt from it. As a 
maxim of defence, in time of danger, its propriety cannot be 
disputed. But whence came this doctrine that we are to stand 
by the Executive, right or wrong ? From what soil of Democracy 
has it sprung? In what part of our Republican history do you 
find the germ from which it has now so suddenly burst forth? 

Sir, the Democracy of other days is not without a voice on 
this subject ; a voice of warning, a voice of rebuke, which I 
trust will not be heard in vain. Every body will remember a 
celebrated controversy which occurred between Alexander Ham- 
ilton and James Madison in the year 1793, on the subject of the 
Proclamation of Neutrality. But every one is not familiar, 



THE WAR WITH MEXICO. 571 

perhaps, with the principles brought under consideration in that 
masterly discussion. I beg leave to refresh the memories of 
gentlemen with a few paragraphs from the papers of James 
Madison on that occasion : 

"Every just view that can be taken of this subject admonishes the public of the 
necessity of a rigid adherence to the simple, the received, and the fundamental doctrine 
of the Constitution, that the power to declare war, including the power of judging of 
the causes of war. is fully and exclusively vested in the Legislature ; that the Execu- 
tive has no right, in any case, to decide the question whether there is or is not cause 
for declaring war ; that the right of convening and informing Congress, whenever such 
a question seems to call for a decision, is all the right which the Constitution has 
deemed requisite or proper ; and that for such, more than for any other contingency, 
this right was specially given to the Executive. 

" In no part of the Constitution is more wisdom to be found than in the clause 
•which confides the question of war or peace to the legislative, and not to the Execu- 
tive department. Besides the objection to such a mixture of heterogeneous powers, 
the trust and the temptation would be too great for any one man ; not such as nature 
may offer as the prodigy of many centuries, but such as may be expected in the ordi- 
nary successions of magistracy. War is in fact the true nurse of Executive aggran- 
dizement. In war, a physical force is to be created, and it is the Executive will which 
is to direct it. In war, the public treasures are to be unlocked, and it is the Executive 
hand which is to dispense them. In war, the honors and emoluments of office are to 
be multiplied, and it is the Executive patronage under which they are to be enjoyed. 
It is in war, finally, that laurels are to be gathered, and it is the Executive brow they 
are to encircle. The strongest passions and most dangerous weaknesses of the human 
breast — ambition, avarice, vanity, the honorable or venial love of fame — are all in 
conspiracy against the desire and duty of peace. 

" Hence it has grown into an axiom, that the Executive is the department of power 
most distinguished by its propensity to war ; hence it is the practice of all States, in 
proportion as they are free, to disarm this propensity of its influence. 

" As the best praise, then, that can be pronounced on an Executive magistrate is, 
that he is the friend of peace — a praise that rises in its value as there may be a known 
capacity to shine in war — so it must be one of the most sacred duties of a free people 
to mark the first omen in the society of principles that may stimulate the hopes of 
other magistrates of another propensity, to intrude into questions on which its gratifi- 
cation depends. If a free people be a wise people also, they will not forget that the 
danger of surprise can never be so great as when the advocates for the prerogative of 
•war can sheathe it in a symbol of peace. 

" The Constitution has manifested a similar prudence in refusing to the Executive 
the sole power of making peace. The trust, in this instance, also, would be too great 
for the wisdom, and the temptations too strong for the virtue, of a single citizen." 

And there is another paragraph in one of the same papers of 
infinitely more significant import : 

" Those who are to conduct a war, cannot, in the nature of things, be proper or 
safe judges, whether a war ought to be commenced, continued or concluded. They 



572 THE AVAR WITH MEXICO. 

are barred from the latter functions by a great principle in free government, analogous 
to that which separates the sword from the purse, or the power of executing from the 
power of enacting laws." 

Much has been said, in the course of this debate, Mr. Chair- 
man, about the doctrines of old-fashioned Federalism. Now 
here, Sir, are the doctrines of old-fashioned Democracy, in the 
very language of one of its ablest and most honored masters. 
And how strangely do they contrast with the manifestoes of 
that modern brood, which boast themselves so vaingloriously of 
their borrowed plumes ! In which one of these golden sentences 
of James Madison do you find any justification of the idea, that 
the Executive department of the government is to be implicitly 
trusted in time of war, and that the vigilance of Congress is to 
suffer itself to be lulled asleep by the insipid opiate of a Presi- 
dent's message ? What can be more emphatic than the declara- 
tion, that " those who are to conduct a war cannot, in the nature 
of things, be proper or safe judges whether a war ought to be 
commenced, continued, or concluded ? " Who can read these 
paragraphs without being deeply impressed with the sentiment 
which pervades them, that if the true spirit of Democracy calls 
upon us ever to be jealous, with an exceeding jealousy, of Exe- 
cutive power, it is when that power has been armed with the 
fearful prerogative of war, and when, as now, that prerogative 
is masked behind "a symbol of peace?" If the democratic 
sensibilities of James Madison were startled and shocked, when 
George Washington, that " prodigy of many centuries," as he 
well entitled him, thought fit to forestall the deliberations of 
Congress by issuing a proclamation of neutrality, what would 
he have said had he lived to see a President, " such as may be 
expected in the ordinary successions of magistracy," not merely 
involving the country in war by his own acts, but proceeding to 
stigmatize as traitors all who may think fit to inquire into the 
causes of the war, or to judge for themselves whether it ought 
to be continued or concluded ? 

But we have been told, Mr. Chairman, that whoever else may 
undertake to cavil at the course of the administration in rela- 
tion to this war, it does not belong to those who voted for it to 
do so. We were elegantly and courteously informed, some 



THE WAR WITH MEXICO. 573 

days ago, that the man who voted for the war, (meaning, of 
course, for the bill of May 13,) and who now complains of the 
Executive, must be little better than a knave. 

Now, Sir, I voted for the bill of May 13, and I complain of 
the Executive ; and I stand here to vindicate the character and 
the consistency of those to whom this foul epithet has been so 
flippantly applied. And let me say at once, that it is from the 
very fact that I voted for that bill, that I feel all the greater right, 
and all the greater obligation, to complain of the course of the 
administration. 

What, Sir, was the bill of May 13th? I deny totally that a 
vote for that bill was, in any just sense of the term, a vote for 
the war. It certainly does not lie in the mouth of the President, 
or any of his friends, to call it so. The President told us on the 
eleventh day of May that the war existed. It existed, as he 
said, and as the preamble of the bill repeated, " by the act of 
Mexico." It existed, as many of us thought, who protested at 
the time against the justice of the preamble, and have never 
ceased protesting against it from that day to this, by his own 
act. At any rate, the war existed, as the President said, as the 
bill said, as I thought then, and as I think still. For I have 
never doubted for a moment, that a state of things had at that 
time been brought about, between this country and Mexico, 
which called for a recognition, on both sides, of the existence of 

war. 

What, then, was the bill of May 13th ? It was a bill to give 
to the Executive the war power, to meet an exigency of exist- 
ing war, and for the purpose of enabling him to accomplish the 
great purpose, which he so solemnly professed to have at heart, 
of reestablishing an honorable peace. This, Sir, is what we on 
this side of the House voted for. 

Doubtless, our action was in some degree influenced by the 
condition of General Taylor's army ; nor can I fail to protest 
against the assertion of an honorable member, that we must 
have known that the army would have extricated itself before 
the succors authorized by the bill could reach them. We could 
not, by any possibility, have known any such thing. It might 
have been regarded as probable that General Taylor would either 



574 THE AVAR WITH MEXICO. 

have been victorious, or have been vanquished, before that time. 
But not few nor feeble were the apprehensions that he might 
have been vanquished. And if such a result had occurred — if 
our army had been conquered, and the captives had been marched 
off to the mines, I leave it to others to take the responsibility of 
saying, that there would then have been no occasion for men and 
money to rescue and redeem them. 

The exigency, however, was not one for calculating chances, 
or speculating on probabilities. The war existed ; and I know 
of no mode of meeting an existing war but by a prompt exer- 
cise of the war power. This is one of the cases to which the 
Irish maxim may be well applied, that "the best way to avoid a 
difficulty is to meet it plump." And so far, while I entertain 
the most perfect respect for those who differed from me, and 
freely admit that the preamble of the bill furnished ample ground 
for honest and patriotic disagreement, I have nothing to regret 
in the vote which I gave for the substantial provisions of that 
bill. 

But now, Sir, comes the question, suggested by the remarks 
of more than one gentleman in this debate. Because we have 
voted, six months ago, under these circumstances, or under any 
other circumstances, to confer the war power upon the Presi- 
dent, are we therefore bound to acquiesce in any and every 
measure for which he may see fit to employ that power ? Be- 
cause for these reasons, or for any reasons, we have intrusted 
that fearful prerogative to the officer to whom the Constitution 
assigns it, when it is to be wielded at all, are we therefore 
responsible for his whole exercise of it, and absolutely estopped 
from complaining of any perversion or abuse of it? 

This is an extraordinary doctrine, indeed ! Suppose, Sir, that 
the President had been found exercising this power with tame- 
ness, or with downright treachery ; suppose he had suffered our 
armies to be taken captive, and our strongholds to be surren- 
dered ; suppose he had invited an invasion of our undisputed 
national soil on this side of the Nueces, or on this side of the 
Sabine ; suppose he had been discovered entering into traitorous 
agreement with the enemy, and admitting their chosen leader not 
merely into their own territory, but into ours, — should we have 



THE WAR WITH MEXICO. 575 

had no right of arraigning him before the country ? No man 
will put forth so preposterous an idea. And if, on the other 
hand, he is found perverting the authority, asked by him and 
given to him as an instrument of peace, to the purposes of in- 
vasion and conquest, and embarking the nation in a mad crusade 
of aggression and aggrandizement, is it not equally our right and 
our bounden duty to call him to account? Is it not especially 
the right, and preeminently the duty, of those who have aided 
in giving him that power, upon far other pretexts, and for far 
other objects, to hold him to his responsibility ? 

Sir, I repeat, it is because the President holds this tremendous 
instrument partly by my vote, that I feel constrained to examine 
well into his course, and to demand of him, vainly perhaps, but 
audibly and earnestly, to remember his pledges, and to pause 
from the prosecution of a policy, at total variance with the origi- 
nal intentions of Congress, and with all the institutions and 
interests of our country. 

Mr. Chairman, in any remarks which I may see fit to make, 
now or hereafter, in rela^on to the existing war, I do not intend 
to justify the conduct of Mexico. I do not deny, I never have 
denied, that we have just cause of complaint against the Mexi- 
can Government. Grossly exaggerated as I regard many of the 
.representations of the President, and of his supporters on this 
floor, in relation to the claims of our citizens for spoliations upon 
our commerce, I yet freely admit that Mexico has been much at 
fault in all this matter. Nor am I disposed to deny that she has 
been at fault in many other matters of more recent occurrence. 
She was wrong in not acknowledging the independence of Texas 
many years ago. She was wrong, when she at last proposed to 
make that acknowledgment, in affixing to it a condition which 
could do her no manner of good, and which was sure to be con- 
strued into an offence to others. She was wrong in breaking 
off so abruptly all diplomatic intercourse with the United States, 
when the act of annexation had passed the two Houses of Con- 
gress. She was wrong in not receiving Mr. Slidell agreeably to 
the understanding between the two Governments, as I conceive, 
when he was sent on a mission of peace more than a year ago. 
She was wrong in not returning a more conciliatory reply to the 



57G THE WAR AVITH MEXICO. 

renewed overtures of the Administration in July last. And she 
will again have been wrong if she shall have persisted, (as I 
fear,) on the assembling of her new Congress, in a final and 
unqualified rejection of all proffers of negotiation. 

I do not say that any, or all, of these acts have furnished the 
Administration with reasonable grounds for making war upon 
her. Far from it. Nor can I say that I am altogether aston- 
ished that Mexico has pursued such a course. No man can 
wonder that the Mexican blood should have been roused by the 
policy which has been manifested by some portions of the 
American people. She has had quite too much reason for 
apprehending that there was a settled purpose in this country of 
ultimately despoiling her of some of her most valuable domains. 
And unless we can discover some ethereal vapor, like that recent- 
ly invented for preventing the pain of surgical operations, and 
which will render nations, as well as individuals, insensible to 
their own dismemberment, we could hardly expect her to be 
entirely cool in the contemplation of such a process. 

Still, I hold her to have been wrong. Her pride has outrun 
her prudence ; her blood has got the better of her judgment ; and 
she has done much to bring upon herself the worst evils she has 
apprehended, by a precipitate and passionate attempt to prevent 
them. Sir, I am not one of those who would be understood to 
say to Mexico, that if I were a Mexican, as I am an American, 
I would not lay down my arms while an American soldier was 
on the soil of my country. Glad as I should be to see every 
American soldier withdrawn from her soil ; sincere as I am in 
believing that our own Administration could not adopt a wiser 
or more honorable course ; strong as I am in the hope, that if, 
through mutual suggestions to a third Power, or in any other 
way, it could be clearly understood that, in such an event, satis- 
factory terms of accommodation could be agreed upon, the 
Administration would not hesitate, as it ought not to hesitate, 
to make the movement ; I still cannot counsel Mexico to insist 
on such a preliminary. 

No, Sir ; if 1 had a voice which I believed would reach beyond 
the little circle of this hall ; if it were possible for me to do what 
an honorable member from Georgia — unintentionally, I am 



THE WAR WITH MEXICO. 577 

sure — was disposed to charge upon some of us a few days ago, 
'■^circulate a speech among the enemy;^^ if I could reach the ear 
of the Mexican rulers or the Mexican people, or could address a 
word to that intelligent and accomplished gentleman who was 
known to us all so favorably little more than a year ago — Gen- 
eral Almonte — and who seems now to be about to assume the 
very lead in the conduct of his country's affairs, I would say to 
him, I would say to them, as one who has been uniformly 
opposed to the annexation of Texas, — as one who at this 
moment desires no peace but such as shall be honorable to both 
countries, to Mexico as well as to the United States, — as one 
who does not desire to see one acre of territory taken from Mex- 
ico as the result of this war, — I would say to them and to him : 
" Abandon something of this haughty spirit ; abate something of 
this false pride, which is hurrying you to your ruin ; reconsider, 
renounce, these resolutions of unyielding defiance which you 
seem rashly to have adopted; and proclaim, without further 
delay, some terms upon which you are ready to meet the 
Government of the United States for an amicable settlement of 
all matters in dispute." I would say to them, that they had 
done enough to exhibit their courage, and to signalize their 
chivalrous sensibility to the national honor. I would tell them, 
that Palo Alto, and the Resaca de la Palma, and the heights of 
Monterey, had already placed their reputation for spirit and valor 
quite above the fortunes of the day. I would tell them, too, 
that they had nothing, nothing whatever, to expect from any 
differences of opinion or dissensions of parties here ; that, how- 
ever anxious some of us might be to put an end to the war, and 
however earnest we might be in rebuking the measures by 
which it was commenced, and in condemning any unnecessary 
prosecution of it, there was yet no party and no person in the 
country from whom they could expect either " aid or comfort ; " 
and that all such imputations, whether coming from the White 
House or from any other quarter, were as baseless as they were 
base. I would tell them, on the contrary, that, in my judgment, 
and in the opinion of all parties, it would be the truest policy 
and the highest honor of Mexico to specify some terms, at the 
earliest moment, on which she would meet the United States 
for the purpose of an amicable arrangement. 

49 



578 THE WAR WITH MEXICO. 

This, Mr. Chairman, would be my speech to Mexico ; and if 
there be any thing treasonable in it, I submit myself to all the 
pains and penalties of the third article of the Constitution. 

But, while these are the views which I entertain sincerely and 
strongly in relation to the Mexican side of this question, do I 
therefore justify the war upon our side ? Because Mexico has 
not acted in many particulars according to my ideas of right and 
justice, am I therefore for pressing her to the wall with fire and 
sword ? Because she obstinately resists all overtures for nego- 
tiation, must I therefore sanction the policy of the Administra- 
tion in overrunning her territory and seizing her dominions ? 
No such thing. I utterly condemn the manner in which the 
war was commenced, and the spirit in which it seems now about 
to be prosecuted, and I shall never hesitate to say so. 

As to the origin of the war, I shall say but few words. It 
should never be forgotten that its primary cause was the annex- 
ation of Texas ; a measure pressed upon the country, by its 
peculiar advocates, with the view of strengthening, extending, 
and perpetuating the institution of domestic slavery. 

Sir, I cherish no feelings of ill-will towards Texas. Now that 
she is a member of our Union, I would speak of her in the 
terms which belong to the intercourse of sister States. But I 
cannot fail to speak plainly in regard to the unconstitutional act 
of her annexation, and the disastrous consequences which have 
thus far attended it. Who forgets the glowing terms in which 
the addition of that lone star to our American constellation was 
heralded I How much of prosperity and of peace, of protection 
to our labor and of defence to our land, was augured from it ! 
Who now can reflect on its consequences as already developed ; 
who can think of the deep wound which, in the judgment of 
many, it has inflicted on our Constitution ; of the alienations and 
heart-burnings which it has produced among different members 
of the Union ; of the fearful looking-for of disunion which it 
has excited ; of the treasure it has cost, and the precious lives it 
has wasted, in the war now in progi-ess ; of the poison it has in 
so many ways mingled with the previously healthful current of 
our national career ; — who can reflect on all this without being 
reminded of another lone star, which " fell from heaven, burning 



THE WAR WITH MEXICO. 579 

as it were a lamp, and it fell upon the third part of the rivers, 
and upon the fountains of waters, and the name of the star is 
called Wormwood, and the third part of the waters became 
wormwood, and many men died of the waters because they 
were bitter ! " 

The more immediate cause of the war was the Executive 
mode of consummating this measure of annexation. Without 
entering at all into the question of the rightful boundaries of 
Texas, this is certain, that Congress, in the very resolution of 
annexation, recognized the fact of a disputed boundary, and 
declared that it should be settled by negotiation. The President 
so interpreted the resolution, and proceeded to proffer negotia- 
tion. I give him all due credit for that. But when he found 
that resort likely to fail, instead of coming to Congress for new 
advice and new instructions, as he ought to have done, as James 
Madison would have done in conformity with those views of his 
which I have already cited, Mr. Polk determined, on his own 
responsibility, to resort to the sword, and marched his armies to 
the outmost verge of Texan pretensions. And no man can deny 
that this unwarrantable act of the Executive gave immediate 
occasion and origin to the war with Mexico. 

But, without another word as to its origin, I turn to a consi- 
deration of its progress and prosecution ; and would that we all, 
of all parties, and I will add of both countries, instead of con- 
tenting ourselves with mutual criminations as to who began the 
war, could enter heartily into the far nobler competition, who 
should be the first, and who do the most, in bringing it to a close! 

For what end, Mr. Chairman, is the vigorous prosecution of 
this war now proposed ? For what purpose are we now called 
upon to give the Executive these ten new regiments of regular 
troops ? I will do the President the justice to take his own an- 
swer to these questions. I quote two paragraphs from his late 
annual message, which admit of no misinterpretation : 

" The war has not been waged with a view to conquest ; but, having been com- 
menced by Mexico, it has been carried into the enemy's country, and will be vigor- 
ously prosecuted there, v/ith a view to obtain an honorable peace, and thereby secure 
ample indemnity for the expenses of the war, as well as to our much-injured citizens, 
who hold large pecuniary demands against Mexico." — Message, p. 22. 

"Among our just causes of complaint against Mexico, arising out of her refusal to 



/ 
/ 



580 THE WAR WITH MEXICO. 

treat for peace, as well before as since the war so unjustly commenced on her part, are 
the extraordinary expenditures in which we have been involved. Justice to our own 
people will make it proper that Mexico should be held responsible for these expendi- 
tures."— /6.;).2G. 

The object of the war is thus described to be " an honorable 
peace." I go heartily for that. I am ready to vote any supplies 
which can really contribute to such a result. But now comes 
the President's definition of this honorable peace : " and thereby 
to secure ample indemnity for the expenses of the war, as well 
as to our much-injured citizens, who hold large pecuniary claims 
against Mexico." 

This, then, is the authentic account of the objects for which 
this war is to be prosecuted : not to settle the boundaries of 
Texas ; not to defend any thing which by the largest construc- 
tion can be called our country ; not even "to conquer a peace" 
in the simple sense of that phrase ; but to secure indemnity for 
the claims of our citizens, and for the expenses of the war. 

Now, Sir, to such a war, prosecuted in this spirit and for these 
ends, I am utterly opposed. I maintain, in the first place, that 
it is not the war which Congress ever intended should be prose- 
cuted, or to which it has ever yet given its sanction. I know 
not how far party discipline may go in bringing up majorities of 
the two branches to sustain such a policy ; but I hazard nothing 
in saying that had it been disclosed at the outset, it would have 
met no sanction in any quarter. Why, does any one for a 
moment believe that if Mexico had refrained from all hostile 
opposition to the annexation of Texas, and had given even the 
assent of a dogged silence to our extending our jurisdiction over 
that territory, we should have ever heard of these claims as the 
ground of war ? The President would not have ventured his 
character upon such a suggestion, and Congress would have 
scorned it, had it been made to them. 

But I maintain, in the second place, that such a policy is 
unworthy of the land, and of the age, in which we live. Is this 
a day, is this a country, in which war, for the mere purpose of 
recovering money from a nation unable to pay it, is to be tole- 
rated ? I do not underrate the importance of securing to our 
citizens a just indemnity for injuries committed upon them in 
any (juarter ; and wherever there is the ability to make that 



THE "^"AR WITH MEXICO. 581 

indemnity, it ought to be exacted, sometimes, perhaps, even to 
the extent of force. And where it is exacted, and where it is 
secured, the Government ought to pay it over to those to whom it 
belongs, as Mr. Polk has refused to do in the case of the French 
spoliations prior to 1800. But a war for extorting payment from 
a poor debtor ! Why, Sir, the day has gone by when we endure 
the practice of coercing individuals who are unable to meet their 
obligations. The imprisonment of poor debtors is rapidly dis- 
appearing from the refined codes of civilized society. The 
abolition of that system is among the highest triumphs of mo- 
dern civilization. But this policy of the Administration would 
seem to carry us back to the barbarous provisions of the laws of 
the Twelve Tables of ancient Rome, which, according to some 
constructions, allowed the creditors to dismember their debtors, 
and distribute among themselves the severed limbs and muti- 
lated trunks I 

Yes, Mr. Chairman, the dismemberment of Mexico for debts 
which she cannot pay, is the humane and Christian policy pro- 
posed to us by the Executive. Money, we all know, cannot be 
wrung from her in any large sums. What little she might have 
had to pay to "our much-injured citizens," we are daily exhaust- 
ing by compelling her to employ it in defending her own soil. 
Why, Sir, this attempt to extort indemnities from Mexico by 
force of arms, reminds one of an old story of ancient Greece. 
Themistocles, it seems, besieged the island of Andros, and called 
upon the inhabitants to pay tribute. He told them that the Athe- 
nians had two great gods, to whom they ought to yield immediate 
submission. One of these gods was Persuasion, and the other 
Compulsion. But the Andrians answered that they, also, had 
two gods — that one of them was Poverty, and the other Imprac- 
ticability ; and that they could not and would not pay him any 
tribute-money. They added that his power could never surpass 
their powerlessness. 

Now, this seems to be about the state of things between us 
and Mexico, so far, at least, as money is concerned. I do not 
know but that we might regard her as having at least three of 
these heathen deities, and add the Fever — el Vomito — to Poverty, 
and Impracticability. 

49* 



582 THE WAR WITH MEXICO. 

Bat she has territory, and this is the sort of indemnity which 
is sought. This, indeed, it is now quite too evident, has been 
the one great object of the whole Executive movement. Nobody 
can read the documents connected with this war, and especially 
those transmitted to us in answer to the call of my honorable 
friend from Kentucky, (Mr. Davis,) without seeing that, from 
first to last, before the war and since, Mexican territory has been 
the great object of the Administration. It is hardly too much 
to say that, had there been no California, there would have been 
no war. As far back as June 24, 1845, we find the purpose of 
securing this possession, as the result of a possible war, plainly 
disclosed in the confidential correspondence of the Navy Depart- 
ment. After the war had once commenced, it is thus boldly 
avowed in a despatch of July 12, 1846 : 

" The object of the United States is, under its rights as a belligerent nation, to possess 
itself entirely of Upper California." 

And again : 

" The object of the United States has reference to ultimate peace with Mexico; and 
if, at that peace, tiie basis of the uli possidetis shall be established, the Government ex- 
pects, through your forces, to be found in actual possession of Upper California." 

Now, Sir, I am not about to depreciate the desirableness to 
the commerce of our country of a good harbor or two on the 
Pacific Ocean. If a strip of California could be added to our 
Oregon possessions, under proper circumstances, and with the 
general consent of the country, I should be one of the last per- 
sons to object to it. But the idea that it is worthy of us to take 
advantage of this war to wrest it from Mexico by force of arms, 
and to protract the war until she w411 consent to cede it to us by 
a treaty of peace, I utterly repudiate. 

It is this lust of territory, Mr. Chairman, which has given 
occasion to this war, and which now proposes to prosecute hostili- 
ties with renewed vigor. It is an appetite which grows by what 
it feeds on. Texas seems only to have furnished a whet for our 
voracity. It was but the stimulating lunch to prepare us for a 
more substantial meal. Sheridan, in the Rivals, I think — my 
classical friend from South Carolina (]Mr. I. E. Holmes) will cor- 
rect me if I am wrong — thought it a very good joke to make 



THE WAK WITH MEXICO. 583 

Mrs. Malaprop say, that " she would have the young lady in- 
structed in ^eomctrij, in order that she might know something of 
the contagions countries." Ah, Sir, the joke has lost its point for 
us. It seems as if all contiguous countries were going to be con- 
tagious to us, and as if we should soon be ready to adopt the lan- 
guage of another character in the same celebrated play, who said 
to his son, " Don't enter the same hemisphere with me ; don't 
dare to breathe the same air or use the same light ; but get an 
atmosphere and a sun of your own ! " 

Meantime, while we are pursuing this wild career of national 
extension and aggrandizement, what has become of that peace 
which we were to have " conquered" three months ago ! Sir, it 
seems to be further off from us at this moment than ever before. 
Whatever gallant arms and brave generals could do to secure it, 
has been done already. Cities have been captured ; fortresses 
have been stormed ; plains have been strewed with the dying 
and the dead ; rivers have been reddened with blood I But 
where is peace ? At the end of what vista, however distant, do 
we see that promised and precious blessing ? If I believed that 
any amount of military force were necessary to establish peace 
at this moment, I should be half inclined to give the Executive 
all, and more than all, that he could ask. But, in my judgment, 
no peace is to be acquired in the way this bill proposes to acquire 
it. We may conquer more armies ; we may overrun more terri- 
tory ; we may " make a solitude and call it peace ; " but peace, 
in any true sense of that term, will still elude our pursuit. We 
shall find no government to make peace with, and no people 
who will conform to the stipulations of any government. The 
peace which such bills as this will give us, will be like that which 
France has conquered in Algiers. That war commenced in 
1829, and France has now a hundred thousand soldiers on the 
Algerine soil to secure her barren conquest. This may do very 
well for France, who desires a training-field for her standing 
armies ; but it will never, never, do for this Republic. 

And where, too, is to be our domestic peace, if this policy is 
to be pursued? According to the President's plan of obtaining 
" ample indemnity for the expenses of the war," the longer the 
war lasts, and the more expensive it is made, the more territory 



584 THE WAR WITH MEXICO. 

we shall require to indemnify us. Every dollar of appropriation 
for this war is thus the purchase-money of more acres of Mexican 
soil. Who knows how much of Chihuahua, and Coahuila, and 
New Leon, and Durango, it will take to remunerate us for the 
expenses of these ten regiments of regulars, who are to be 
enlisted for five years ? And to what end are we thus about to 
add acre to acre and field to field ? To furnish the subject of 
that great domestic struggle^ which has already been fore- 
shadowed in this debate! 

]Mr. Chairman, I have no time to discuss the subject of slavery 
on this occasion, nor should I desire to discuss it in this connec- 
tion, if I had more time. But I must not omit a few plain 
words on the momentous issue which has now been raised. I 
speak for Massachusetts — I believe I speak the sentiments of 
all New England, and of many other States out of New Eng- 
land — when I say, that, upon this question, our minds are made 
up. So far as we have power — constitutional or moral power — 
to control political events, we are resolved that there shall be no 
further extension of the territory of this Union, subject to the 
institutions of slavery. This is not a matter to argue about with 
us. My honorable friend from Georgia (Mr. Toombs) must 
pardon me if I do not enter into any question with him whether 
such a policy be equal or just. It may be that the North does 
not consider the institution of slavery a fit thing to be the subject 
of equal distribution or nice weighing in the balances. I cannot 
agree with him that the South gains nothing by the Constitution 
but the right to reclaim fugitives. Surely he has forgotten that 
slavery is the basis of representation in this House. 

But I do not intend to argue the case. I wish to deal with it 
calmly, but explicitly. I believe the North is ready to stand by 
the Constitution, with all its compromises, as it now is. I do 
not intend, moreover, to throw out any threats of disunion, what- 
ever may be the result. I do not intend, now or ever, to contem- 
plate disunion as a cure for any imaginable evil. At the same 
time I do not intend to be driven from a firm expression of pur- 
pose, and a steadfast adherence to principle, by any threats of 
disunion from any other ([uarter. The people of New England, 
whom I have any privilege to speak for, do not desire, as I under- 



THE WAR WITH MEXICO. 585 

stand their views — I know my own heart and my own principles, 
and can at least speak for them — to gain one foot of territory 
by conquest, and as the result of the prosecution of the war with 
Mexico. I do not believe that even the abolitionists of the 
North — though I am one of the last persons who would be 
entitled to speak their sentiments — would be unwilling to be 
found in combination with Southern gentlemen, who may see 
fit to espouse this doctrine. We desire peace. We believe that 
this war ought never to have been commenced, and we do not 
wish to have it made the pretext for plundering Mexico of one 
foot of her lands. But if the war is to be prosecuted, and if 
territories are to be conquered and annexed, we shall stand fast 
and forever to the principle that, so far as we are concerned, 
these territories shall be the exclusive abode of freemen. 

Mr. Chairman, peace, peace is the grand compromise of this 
question between the North and the South. Let the President 
abandon all schemes of further conquest. Let him abandon his 
plans of pushing his forces to the heart of Mexico. Now, before 
any reverses have been experienced by the American arms, he 
can do so with the highest honor. Let him exhibit a spirit of 
magnanimity towards a weak and distracted neighbor. Let 
him make distinct proclamation of the terms on which he is 
ready to negotiate ; and let those terms be such as shall involve 
no injustice towards Mexico, and engender no sectional strife 
among ourselves. But, at all events, let him tell us what those 
terms are to be. A proclamation of Executive purposes is essen- 
tial to any legislative or any national harmony. The North 
ought to know them ; the South ought to know them ; the 
whole country ought to understand for what ends its blood and 
treasure are to be expended. It is high time that some specific 
terms of accommodation were proclaimed to Congress, to 
Mexico, and to the world. If they be reasonable, no man will 
hesitate to unite in supplying whatever means may be necessary 
for enforcing them. 

And now. Sir, what is the precise bill before us ? It is a bill 
to increase the standing army of the country by the addition of 
ten new regiments of a thousand men each. It has no relation 
to the present support or relief of our army and volunteers now 



586 THE WAR WITH MEXICO. 

in Mexico. These regiments cannot, by any possibility, be 
recruited under a year, or a year and a half. The report of the 
Adjutant-General, dated 5th December last, distinctly shows 
this. He states that " the recruiting service has been pushed 
with vigor," and then proceeds to give us the results. He says : 
" The whole number of men enlisted from the 1st of October, 
1845, to the 30th of September, 1846, is 5,945 ; being an excess 
of 2,388 over the previous year. The number enlisted in Octo- 
ber and November, and to be enlisted in December, may be put 
down at 1,500." 

If only 1,500 can be enlisted in three months, with this 
" vigorous pushing," it is plain that it will take a year to enlist 
6,000, and another half year to complete the ten regiments. But 
it will take a much longer time than this. 

The authorized regular force, at this moment, is 16,998; or 
deducting the commissioned officers, 16,218. But the whole 
rank and file of the army, notwithstanding the " vigorous- 
pushing" of the recruiting service, could only be computed at 
10,000 on the 31st of December last. 

There are thus more than 6,000 men still to be enlisted under 
existing authority, which, according to the estimates of the 
Adjutant-General, will require a full year, and thus postpone 
the completion of these new regiments to two years and a half 
from the present time. 

It is plain, therefore, that these new regiments are called for 
with no reference to any immediate exigencies, but only in con- 
templation of future distant service and a protracted war. 

The President has already in the field 24,984 men. Of these 
8,473 are regulars, and 16,511 volunteers. He has already en- 
listed 1,500 more regulars, and about 9,000 more volunteers, 
making an aggregate force of about 36,000. He has authority, 
under existing laws, to increase the regular force to 17,000 and 
the volunteers to 50,000, making an aggregate force of 67,000 
men. And now he calls for authority to raise 10,000 more of 
regulars. To what end is this vast array of military power? 
The enlistment is to be during the war, or for five years. It 
cannot be completed under a year and a half or two years. 
What visions of protracted conflict do these facts unfold I 



THE WAR WITH MEXICO. 587 

The proviso of the bill authorizes the President to appoint 
the officers of these ten regiments during the recess of Congress, 
and to report them to the Senate at their next session. This 
proviso proves that these regiments are not expected to be in 
readiness for any present support or relief of the troops in 
Mexico. The officers are not to be appointed until Congress 
has adjourned. What a power is this to confer on the Presi- 
dent I Nobody imagines that the Senate can exercise any 
effective check upon appointments so made, and when the offi- 
cers are once at their posts. Four or five hundred commissions, 
of all grades, from brigadier-generals down to lieutenants, are 
thus to be placed in the hands of the President. How many of 
them are to be dangled in the eyes of members of this House, 
with the view of carrying measures which seem now to meet 
with no particular favor, remains to be seen. 

But the great objection to the bill is the policy which it dis- 
closes. In proposing this measure and that of the Lieutenant- 
General, the Administration virtually call upon Congress to 
sanction the ultra and extravagant policy which they have 
recently adopted in regard to this war. I say recently adopted, 
for it is plain that a new spirit has come over the dream of the 
Executive on this subject. 

On the 11th of November last the Secretary of War addressed 
a letter, which is in print, to a gentleman in Kentucky, in which 
he said : " It is proper, however, to say that the amount of force 
already in service is deemed sufficient for the prosecution of the 
war." 

On the 16th day of the same November he issued a requisi- 
tion for ten new regiments of volunteers to serve during the 
war. What occurred during these five days to change the whole 
policy of the Administration has never been disclosed, but it is 
plain that a marvellous change was wrought. And in pursu- 
ance of it, these ten new regiments of regulars are now called 
for. This new policy can be nothing less than one of invasion 
and conquest. 

The report of the Committee on Foreign Affairs in June last 
said : " Texas, and indemnity for wrongs confessed by several 
treaties, coasts and borders in tranquil possession without trans- 



\ 



588 THE WAR WITH MEXICO. 

atlantic interference, are all we insist upon. It will be Mexican 
infatuation, should the contest become one of races, of borders, 
of conquest, and of territorial extension." 

Mexican infatuation, I presume. Sir, is at length sufficiently 
manifested, and this contest of races, borders, conquest, and 
territorial extension is to be commenced. And this contest 
Cono-ress is now called upon to sanction. If it be not so, the 
President can inform us. But if, as I cannot doubt, this be the 
policy, I am entirely opposed to it, and I feel bound to express 
that opposition in the most unequivocal terms. 



THE 

CONQUEST OF MEXICAN TEEPJTORY, 

A SPEECH DELIVERED IX THE HOtTSE OF EErRESENTATIVES OF THE 
UNITED STATES, IX COMMITTEB 
THE tJXIOX, FEBRUARY, ;22, 1847. 



The Army Bill being under consideration in Committee of the Whole on the state 
of the Union, — 
Mr. WiNTHROP moved to add the following provisos to the first clause of the bill : 

Provided, That no more than a proportionate amount of the money appropriated 
by the two first sections of this bill shall be expended during any one quarter of the 
year for which said appropriations are made. 

" Provided, also, That so much of said appropriations as shall be unexpended at the 
next meeting of Congress, shall be subject to reconsideration and revocation. 

" Provided, further, That these appropriations are made with no view of sanctioning 
any prosecution of the existing war with Mexico for the acquisition of territory to 
form new States to be added to the Union, or for the dismemberment in any way of 
the Kepublic of Mexico." 

The question having been stated, Mr. "Winthrop addressed the Committee as 
follows : — 

There are few things, Mr. Chairman, more trying to the tem- 
per of one who has any reverence for order, or any regard for 
appropriateness, than the course of proceedings in this House. 
It was a saying of Solomon, " a word spoken in due season, 
how good is it ! " Another of his proverbs compared such a 
word to " apples of gold in pictures of silver." But it would 
have puzzled even Solomon himself to realize his own ideas in 
such a body as this. There seems to be no such thing as saying 
a seasonable word in this House. No man can say the thing he 
wishes to say, at the time he wishes to say it. One must be 

50 



590 THE CONQUEST OF MEXICAN TERRITORY. 

always out of season, either for himself, or for the House, or for 
the subject, or perhaps for all at once. 

My own experience upon this point does not differ materially, 
I am sure, from that of those around me. A few weeks ago I 
desired to say something about the Loan bill. "What happened? 
It was whipped through the House at the rate of half a million 
a minute. One hour of discussion was allowed for a bill of 
twenty-eight millions of dollars I Nothing remained for all of us 
but silent votes. 

Next came the Three Million bill. I desired to say a word 
about that. But, after struggling for the floor for two or three 
days, I was compelled to content myself with an unexplained 
vote upon that bill also. 

Last week I had proposed to make a few remarks upon the 
Armv bill, which, it was understood, was to form the subject of 
debate on Friday and Saturday. Other business intervened, 
and no Army bill was brought forward. 

This morning I came into the House prepared to enter upon 
the discussion of the new Tariff bill, which the chairman of the 
Committee of Ways and Means had given us formal notice 
would be taken up to-day. But the new Tariff bill is now 
passed over, and lo ! the Army bill is before us. 

Well, Sir, I will not complain. I ought to be too grateful, 
perhaps, for getting the floor at all, amidst such a crowd of com- 
petitors, to indulge in any fault-finding on the occasion. At 
any rate, I will seize the moment as it flies ; revert, as well as I 
can, to my last week's preparations, and proceed, without further 
preface, to the consideration of the bill which has just been read. 

As one of the members of the committee by which this bill 
has been framed, I feel bound to call the attention of the House 
and of the country to its peculiar and extraordinary character. 
Undoubtedly, Sir, it is the great bill of the session. It appro- 
priates a sum of money little short of thirty millions of dollars 
to the military service of the Government. The amendments 
which will be moved, under the authority of the Committee of 
Ways and Means, will probably swell the amount considerably 
beyond that sum.* It has been prepared in conformity with 

*The whole sum appvopi-iatcd by this bill, as it finally passed the House, was 
$34,545,389.37. 



THE CONQUEST OF MEXICAN TERRITORy. 591 

estimates from the Departments, looking to the most vigorous 
prosecution of the existing war. More than fourteen millions of 
dollars are appropriated to " transportation and supplies in the 
Quartermaster's Department" — an item having unquestion- 
able reference to further, and still further, invasion of the territo- 
ries of Mexico. Finally, Sir, this bill runs through a period of 
sixteen months from this 22d day of February, and provides for 
supporting and prosecuting this war to the 30th day of June) 
18481 

Mr. Chairman, the Congress of the United States to-day has 
some control over the Executive in relation to this war. To- 
day, discussion in regard to its ends and objects, its conduct and 
its conclusion, is something more than empty breath. To-day, 
the Representatives of the people have the reins in their own 
hands. But pass this bill; pass it without proviso or limitation ; 
and to-morrow the President is out of our reach. We have 
given him a carte blanche. "We have given him a charter wide 
as the wind. We have surrendered the purse to the same hands 
which already hold the sword, and have virtually said to him, 
" March on, slay, burn, sack, plunder, at your own sovereign will 
and pleasure. So far as thirty millions of dollars for the land 
forces alone (to say nothing of ten or twelve millions more for the 
navy) will serve your turn, you have unlimited discretion to 
invade and conquer for sixteen months to come ! " 

This, Sir, is the language of this bill, as it stands. Is it repub- 
lican language? Is it democratic language? Is it constitutional 
language ? 

Are you aware, Mr. Chairman, is this House aware, that the 
Parliament of Great Britain, omnipotent as it is often called, 
have never ventured of late years to pass such a bill as this ? 
The British Parliament, in all the plenitude of its power, could 
not pass this bill, without violating one of the principles of the 
constitution of the realm. That principle, unwritten, indeed, 
but firmly established by the practice of a long series of years, 
is, that appropriations for the support of standing armies should 
not be made for a longer term than a single year. 

Our own Constitution is explicit upon the subject. Congress 
shall have power, it says, " to raise and support armies, but no 



592 THE CONQUEST OF MEXICAN TERRITORY.. 

appropriation of money to that use shall be for a longer term 
than two years." This bill keeps carefully within the letter of 
the Constitution ; but how far does it conform to the spirit of 
the instrument? Who can doubt that this limitation of two 
years had reference to the Congressional term — to the official 
tenure of the Representatives of the people ? Who can ques- 
tion that this limitation was intended to secure to each successive 
Congress the right and the opportunity of controlling the sup- 
plies for the army during its own term, and to prevent the 
representatives of the people, at any time, from forestalling the 
action of their freshly chosen successors ? 

Now, Sir, what are we doing here to-day ? The term of the 
present Congress is on the eve of expiration. In less than 
another fortnight, this body will have finished its work, for good 
or for evil, and will be dissolved. A new Congress is already in 
part elected. By the theory of the Constitution, it will be in 
existence on the morning of the 4th of March next. It ought 
to be practically in existence on that day, ready to proceed, at 
the summons of the Executive, to the discharge of its duties. 
At all events, its constitutional term commences on that day ; 
and on that day the functions and the authority of the present 
Congress are at an end. And yet here we are, in this last hour 
of our existence, proposing to stretch out a dead hand over six- 
teen months out of the twenty-four months of the term of our 
successors — over two thirds of their whole official existence — 
and to foreclose, for that long period, all right, or certainly all 
power, on their part, to control the course of the Government 
upon so momentous a subject as the prosecution of a war of 
invasion and conquest ! The Representatives of the people, 
freshly chosen, are, according to this bill, to have no voice as to 
the number of the standing army of the country, or as to its 
employment and support, at home or abroad, for sixteen months 
from the commencement of their term ! 

Sir, this is a new course of proceeding in this country. It 
never was known till now, in time of war. It has been known 
but for a few years in time of peace. Until 1843 our appropri- 
ation bills ran from January to January. A change of the fiscal 
year was then made as a matter of convenience. I have no 



THE CONQUEST OF MEXICAN TERRITORY. 593 

doubt that it has proved a matter of great convenience ; and, as 
an arrangement for a time of peace, I do not object to it. But 
I utterly protest against its being applied under the present cir- 
cumstances of the country, and to the extent to which this bill 
proposes to carry it. 

In my judgment. Sir, a due regard to republican principles, to 
the spirit of the Constitution, and to the rights of the people as 
committed to their representatives, would demand of us to 
forbear from making appropriations which should render the 
Executive independent of the Legislative department in the 
prosecution of this war, not merely beyond December next, when 
the new Congress would regularly be assembled, but even 
beyond the earliest day at which that Congress could be con- 
vened under a call from the President. 

I have no fancy for extra sessions of Congress. Nothing 
would be less convenient or less agreeable to myself personally 
than to be called here in June or July. But it is not what you 
or I might find agreeable or convenient, that we are called on to 
consider at such a moment as this, but what the principles of 
the Constitution and the interests of the country require. 

Still less are we at liberty to shape our legislation according 
to the likings or dislikings of the President. I have no idea that 
the President desires us to leave him under any necessity to 
summon a new Congress. He has given abundant evidence of 
his disposition to do without Congress altogether. A more 
edifying chapter will never be found in our history, than that 
which shall fully and faithfully record the encroachments of the 
Executive upon the Legislative authority during the two last 
years. The first march of the American army across the Sabine 
— where was the constitutional power of the President to direct 
that ? The annexation of Texas to this Union was not then 
consummated. Six months were yet to elapse before that act 
was to be completed. Doubtless this Government had incurred 
some obligation to defend Texas from the consequences to which 
that measure had exposed her. But that was an obligation for 
Congress to recognize — for Congress to provide for. The Pres- 
ident, however, determined to do without Congress, and took 
the responsibility of marching our armies into a foreign country. 

50* 



594 THE CONQUEST OF MEXICAN TERRITORY. 

A more palpable violation of the Constitution was never perpe- 
trated. 

Then came the march across the Nueces, into a territory 
which Congress had expressly declared to be a disputed terri- 
tory. Sir, the determination of the President to do without 
Congress, to avoid and evade its legitimate control, was the 
more signal in this case, from the fact that Congress was at that 
moment in session. It would only have required a message 
from one end of Pennsylvania avenue to the other, to have 
enabled the President to obtain the opinion and decision of the 
Senate and House of Representatives of the United States upon 
a movement, which was the indisputable source and spring of 
this INIexican war. But the President knew that the decision of 
Congress would be against any such movement. He deter- 
mined, therefore, to do without Congress, and issued an order 
for the march secretly, stealthily, and upon his own unwarranted 
authority. I repeat, then, Mr. Chairman, without detaining the 
committee with other and obvious instances, that the willingness 
of the President to do without Congress is quite too manifest : 
and that it is not to his likings or dislikings, but to our own 
constitutional rights and responsibilities, that we ought to look, 
in deciding how far it is fit to place him beyond the reach of 
legislative control and restraint, and how long it is fit to leave 
him there. 

Let it not be forgotten. Sir, that during the last war Congress 
was never out of session for more than three or four months at 
a time. The truly democratic President of that day, James 
Madison, would never have dreamed of doing without Congress 
for sixteen months in time of war. But the democratic Con- 
gress of that day did not wait for the Executive to summon 
them. They adjourned themselves from time to time. If their 
term ended in March, they appointed a meeting for the new 
Congress in July ; if they closed a session in July, they ad- 
journed to meet in November. They plainly regarded it as their 
constitutional right, and their constitutional duty, to watch over 
the progress of Ihe war, and to provide ^>/-o re natd for its exigen- 
cies and its emergencies. 

And this, unquestionably, Mr. Chairman, is the duty of Con- 



THE CONQUEST OP MEXICAN TERRITORY. 695 

gress now. The new Congress, fresh from the people, ought to 
decide, and ought to be left free to decide, what shall be done in 
relation to this Mexican war, and what provisions shall be made 
for its futm-e prosecution during the next two years. Sir, an 
appeal has been made to the people on this very subject. Their 
representatives have been chosen in many cases, and are on the 
point of being chosen in many other cases, with reference to this 
war. The war has been condemned in many parts of the coun- 
try, and is doomed to condemnation in many other parts. How 
few of us are to be our own successors (if I may so speak) in 
the next Congress ! Everybody knows that there will be a very 
different state of parties in this House next year, even if major- 
ities and minorities should not absolutely change sides. And is 
the revolution of popular sentiment, thus indicated, to be deprived 
of all operation and influence upon this odious war for a year 
and a half to come ? Is that your idea of democracy ? Sir, if 
the Administration insist upon pressing these enormous supplies 
through the House in this last week of its official existence, it 
will be because they know that the new Congress would not 
grant them, and because they intend to persist in the prosecution 
of the war in defiance of the plainest manifestations of the will 
of the people ! 

And here let me remind the committee, that there is nothing 
in this bill to prevent the President from employing this whole 
vast sum of thirty millions of dollars in a single month. After 
the first day of July next the whole of it will be at his disposal. 
He may spend it all in one mad and desperate onslaught upon 
Mexico, and come back upon Congress in December to supply 
the deficiencies of the year! 

Sir, have we not built up the Executive power of this country 
to a sufficiently fearful height already ? We have given the 
President a standing army of nearly thirty thousand men. We 
have authorized him to appoint four or five hundred officers in 
the ten new regiments, upon his own responsibility, without any 
appeal to the Senate. We have heard of the " King's Own" 
and the " Queen's Own" in other countries: these regiments are 
clearly " the President's Own," " Polk's Own." We have author- 
ized him to employ fifty thousand volunteers, and he has called 



596 THE CONQUEST OF MEXICAN TERRITORY. 

upon US to extend this authority. We now propose to give him 
thirty millions of dollars without limitation or condition, and to 
bid him ride on, conquering and to conquer, for a year and a half, 
unless in the mean time he shall want more money I Once more 
I ask, is this Democracy ? 

Mr. Chairman, I have intimated on another occasion that I do 
not go so far as some of my friends in regard to the propriety or 
expediency of withholding all supplies from the Executive. While 
a foreign nation is still in arms against us, I would limit the 
supplies to some reasonable scale of defence, and not withhold 
them altogether. I would pay for all services of regulars or 
volunteers already contracted for. I would provide ample means 
to prevent our army from suffering, whether from the foe or 
from famine, as long as they are in the field under constitutional 
authority. Heaven forbid that our gallant troops should be left 
to perish for want of supplies because they are on a foreign soil, 
while they are liable to be shot down by the command of their 
own officers if they refuse to remain there ! But I cannot regard 
it as consistent with constitutional or republican principles to 
pass this bill as it now stands. Even if I approved the war, I 
should regard such a course of legislation as unwarrantable. 
Disapproving it, as I unequivocally and unqualifiedly do, I am 
the more induced to interpose these objections to its adoption. 

Sir, this whole Executive policy of overrunning Mexico to 
obtain territorial indemnities for pecuniary claims and the ex- 
penses of the war, is abhorrent to every idea of humanity and of 
honor. For one, I do not desire the acquisition of one inch 
of territory by conquest. I desire to see no fields of blood an- 
nexed to this Union, whether the price of the treachery by which 
they have been procured shall be three million pieces of silver or 
only thirty! I want no more areas of freedom. Area, if I re- 
member right, signified threshing-floor, in my old school diction- 
ary. We have had enough of these areas, whether of freedom 
or slavery; and I trust this war will be brought to a close with- 
out multiplying or extending them. 

I repeat this the more emphatically, lest my vote in favor of 
the Three Million bill should be misinterpreted. Nothing was 
further from my intention, in giving that vote, than to sanction 



THE CONQUEST OF MEXICAN TERRITORY. 697 

the policy of the Executive in regard to the territories of Mexico. 
If he insists, indeed, on pursuing that policy, and if a majority 
of Congress insist on giving him the means, I prefer purchase to 
conquest; and had rather authorize the expenditure of three 
millions to pay Mexico, than of thirty millions to whip her. 
But everybody must have understood that the proviso was a 
virtual nullification of the bill, for any purpose of acquiring 
territory, in the hands of a Southern administration. 

It was for that proviso that I voted. I wished to get the great 
principle which it embodied fairly on the statute-book. I believe 
it to be a perfectly constitutional principle, and an eminently 
conservative principle. 

Sir, those who undertake to dispute the constitutionality of 
that principle must rule out of existence something more than 
the immortal ordinance of 1787. My honorable friend from 
South Carolina (Mr. Burt) reminded us the other day that Mr. 
Madison, in the Federalist, had cast some doubt on the author- 
ity of the Confederation Congress to pass that ordinance. He 
did so. But with what view. Sir ? Not to bring that act into 
discredit, but to enforce upon the people of the United States 
the importance of adopting a new system of government, under 
which such acts might henceforth be rightfully done. This new 
system of government was adopted. The Constitution was 
established. In the very terms of that Constitution is found a 
provision recognizing the authority of Congress to prevent the 
extension of slavery, after a certain number of years, " in the 
existing States," and to prevent its introduction into the territories 
immediately. What more? During .the first session of the first 
Congress of the United States, under this new Constitution, this 
same Northwestern ordinance, with its anti-slavery clause, was 
solemnly recognized and reenacted. This is a fact never before 
noticed, to my knowledge, and one to which I beg the attention 
of the House. Here is the eighth act of the first session of the 
first Congress. Listen to the preamble : 

" Wliereas, in order that the ordinance of the United States, in Congress assembled 
for the government of the territory northwest of the river Ohio, may continue to have 
full effect, it is requisite that certain provisions should be made, so as to adapt the same 
to the present Constitution of the United States : 

" Be it enacted," ^-c. 



598 THE CONQUEST OP MEXICAN TERRITORY. 

Then follow a few formal changes in regard to the Governor 
and other officers. The sixth article of the ordinance remains 
untouched. Mr. Madison was a member of this first Congress, 
as were many others of those most distinguished in framing the 
new Constitution. And this bill passed both branches without 
objection, and without any division, except upon some immate- 
rial amendments. 

Here, then, we find the very framers of the Constitution them- 
selves, in the first year of its adoption, applying the principle of 
the Wilmot proviso to all the territories which the General 
Government then possessed, without compromise as to latitude 
or longitude. These territories were as much the fruit of the 
common sacrifices, common toils, and common blood of all the 
States, as any which can now be conquered from Mexico. They 
were the joint and common property of the several States. The 
ordinance was unanimously adopted in 1787, and was reenacted 
unanimously in 1789. Madison, who had questioned the au- 
thority of the Congress of the Confederation to pass it origin- 
ally, voted for it himself in the Congress of the Constitution, 
and all his colleagues from the siaveholding States voted for it 
with him. Sir, if the constitutionality of such an act can now 
be disputed, I know not what principle of the Constitution can 
be considered as settled. 

I have said that I regarded this principle as eminently con- 
servative, as well as entirely constitutional. I do believe. Sir, 
that whenever the principle of this proviso shall be irrevocably 
established, shall be considered as unchangeable as the laws of 
the Medes and Persians, then, and not till then, we shall have 
permanent peace with other countries, and fixed boundaries for 
our own country. It is plain that there are two parties in the 
free States. Both of them are opposed, uncompromisingly op- 
posed, as I hope and believe, to the extension of slavery. One 
of them, however, and that the party of the present Administra- 
tion, are for the widest extension of territory, subject to the anti- 
slavery proviso. The other of them, and that the party to which 
I have the honor to belong, are, as I believe, content with the 
Union as it is, desire no annexation of new States, and are 
utterly opposed to the prosecution of this war for any purpose 



THE CONQUEST OF MEXICAN TERRITORY. 599 

of dismembering Mexico. Between these two parties in the 
free States, the South holds the balance of power. It may 
always hold it. If now, therefore, it will join in putting an end 
to this war, and in arresting the march of conquest upon which 
our armies have entered, the limits of the Republic as well as 
the limits of slavery may be finally established. 

It is in this view that I believe the principle of the Wilmot 
proviso to be the great conservative principle of the day, and it is 
in this view that I desire to place it immutably upon our statute- 
book. The South has no cause to be jealous of such a move- 
ment from our side of the House. The South should rather 
welcome it — the whole country should welcome it — as an over- 
ture of domestic peace. 

Sir, much as I deplore the war in which we are involved — 
deeply as I regret the whole policy of annexation — if the result 
of these measures should be to ingraft the policy of this proviso 
permanently and ineradicably upon our American system, I 
should regard it as a blessing cheaply purchased. Good would, 
indeed, have been brought out of evil ; and we should be almost 
ready to say, with the great dramatist of old England : 

" If after every tempest comes such calm, 
Let the winds blow till they hare wakened death." 

Yes, Sir, in that event, instead of indulging in any more jeers 
and taunts upon the lone Star of Texas, we might rather hail 
it as the star of hope, and promise, and peace, and might be 
moved to apply to it the language of another great English poet: 

" Fairest of Stars! last in the train of night, 
If better thou belong not to the dawn." 

If we could at last lay down permanently the boundaries of 
our Republic ; if we could feel that we had extinguished forever 
the lust of extended dominion in the bosoms of the American 
people ; if we could present that old god. Terminus, of whom 
we have heard such eloquent mention elsewhere, not with out- 
stretched arm still pointing to new territories in the distance, 
but with limbs lopped off, as the Romans sometimes represented 
him, betokening that he had reached his very furthest goal ; if 



600 THE CONQUEST OF MEXICAN TERRITORY. 

we could be assured that our limits were to be no further ad- 
vanced, either by purchase or conquest, by fraud or by force ; 
then, then, we might feel that we had taken a bond of fate 
for the perpetuation of our Union. 

It is in this spirit that I voted for the proviso in the Three Mil- 
lion bill. It is in this spirit that I offer the third proviso to the 
Thirty Million bill before us. Pass them both ; cut off, by one 
and the same stroke, all idea both of the extension of slavery 
and the extension of territory ; and we shall neither need the 
three millions nor the thirty millions, for securing peace and 
harmony, both at home and abroad. 

I perceive, however, Mr. Chairman, that this result is not yet 
to be accomplished. The bill before us will become a law, with- 
out proviso or condition of any kind. The tremendous power 
of purse and sword combined, is to be conferred on the President, 
and he is to be left to wield it upon his own responsibility for a 
full year to come. O, Sir, let him remember that, though " it 
is excellent to have a giant's strength, it is tyrannous to use it 
like a giant I " Let him remember that, though we may relieve 
him from all responsibility to us, his responsibility to his country 
and to his God remains. The President can make peace with 
Mexico, if he pleases to do so. He has proved that he can usurp 
authority to make war ; let him show that he is willing to em- 
ploy the authority constitutionally conferred upon him, to make 
peace. I repeat, Sir, he can make peace if he will. He can stop 
fighting. He can agree to an armistice. He can signify to 
Mexico that he has no design to dismember her domain or 
destroy her independence. He can withdraw his armies to the 
Rio Grande. Peace would follow these steps, as surely as the 
day the night. 

Two occasions, Mr. Chairman, have already occurred, when 
the President might have put an end to this war with the high- 
est honor to himself and to the country. If, after the battles of 
the Rio Grande, he had forborne from all further invasion, con- 
tented himself with the triumphs already achieved and the terri- 
tory already acquired, and placed iiimself entirely on the defen- 
sive, the war could not have survived the summer. If, again, 
after the successful storming of Monterey — an exploit which 



.THE CONQUEST OF MEXICAN TERRITORY. 601 

will not suffer by comparison with any thing in the military 
annals of the world — he had taken advantage of the terms of 
capitulation which the brave and generous Taylor had so hu- 
manely and so wisely sanctioned, and had adopted the plan of 
masterly inactivity which that sagacious General proposed, an 
honorable peace might have been looked for at an early day. 
But a mad spirit of aggression and conquest was still destined to 
prevail. The capitulation was denounced. An officer was 
despatched, posthaste, to disavow and break up the armistice. 
The brilliant achievement of our armies was disparaged. Their 
noble-hearted commander was not even named in the Executive 
message. And a cry for more Mexican blood went forth from 
all the organs of the Administration. 

And now. Sir, if I mistake not, a third opportunity is about 
to be offered for ending this war with whatever distinction may 
attach to military and naval success. A blow is about to be 
struck at Vera Cruz. It can hardly fail to be successful. That 
far-famed castle will be surrendered to our arms, as it lately was 
to those of France. All that gallant troops and brave tars can 
do, in that quarter, will be done ; and victorious wreaths will 
once more adorn the brow of the veteran Scott. 

And why should not the war end here? What object is to 
be gained by further fighting ? Does the President propose to 
hold this castle ? Why, Sir, I am informed, by one who knows, 
that even the Mexican garrison, composed of acclimated men, 
to whom the malaria of that region had been their daily breath 
from infancy, were dying there last summer at the rate of thirty 
men a day. How many of an American garrison can live 
there ? Does the President propose to march to the capital of 
Mexico ? Our armies may reach it ; but it will only be to 
realize the idea which Dr. Franklin expressed in regard to the 
British armies in 1777, when they reached the capital of Penn- 
sylvania. " Sir William Howe," said he, " has not taken 
Philadelphia ; it is Philadelphia which has taken Sir William 
Howe." 

Mr. Chairman, the President must abandon the absurd idea 
that he can only obtain peace by conquering it. The only con- 
quest which is now needed, in order to secure peace, is that 

51 



602 THE CONQUEST OP MEXICAN TERKITORY. 

noblest of all conquests, in which fortune has no share, a conquest 
over himself; and would to Heaven that we could vote him 
supplies enough of true courage and real patriotism to enable 
him to achieve it! He has only to conquer his own self-will, 
his own pride of opinion, his own ambition to associate his 
name with the acquisition of more territory, and we can have 
peace to-morrow ! Let him but stop fighting, declare an armis- 
tice, and disclaim all idea of spoliation or dismemberment, and 
then, however we may continue to quarrel about the declaration 
that " war exists by the act of Mexico," we shall all be able to 
agree that " peace exists by the act of the President." And, 
Sir, if he should live a thousand years, he will never win a 
nobler tribute than this. 

Before taking my seat, Mr. Chairman, as the clock warns me 
I shall soon be obliged to do, I propose to make a few remarks 
on the new tariff which has been brought forward by the Com- 
mittee of Ways and Means to furnish the sinews of this war. 
I remember that, some seven or eight years ago, a paper was 
sent to the table of the House of Representatives of Massachu- 
setts, which it became my official duty to announce, and which, 
either from ignorance or accident, was indorsed, " Remonstrance 
against the Annexation of TaxesJ^ This mistake has proved to 
have been quite premonitory. It was very much like spelling 
lone star, 1-o-a-n. Loans and taxes are the legitimate fruits of 
the great measure of annexation. We have had a loan bill, and 
we now have a tax bill. For the first I have already voted. 
For the last, as it now stands, I shall not vote ; and I desire to 
state some of the general views which govern me in this course. 
I am ready, Sir, now and at all times, to unite in maintaining 
the national credit. I do not desire to see the evils of an odious 
war multiplied and aggravated by disordered finances and a bank- 
rupt Treasury. If our armies are to be kept afoot, wherever 
they may be, and in whatever numbers they may be, I am for 
having means enough in the Treasury for feeding them, and 
clothing them, and paying them. I am for paying them, too 
if possible, not with depreciated paper, but in a sound redeem- 
able currency. I desire to leave the Administration no apology 
or pretence for supporting our troops by a system of pillage and 
plunder in the enemy's country. 



THE CONQUEST OF MEXICAN TERRITORY. 603 

There are purposes of peace, too, which require money. 
There are just debts to be paid, important establishments to be 
supported, cherished institutions to be maintained, noble chari- 
ties to be administered ; and the Treasury must be supplied to 
meet the requirements of them all. 

With these views I voted for the loan bill. I believed it to 
be a necessary provision for sustaining the public credit. I 
believed, and still believe, that even should the Administration 
reconsider and reverse the rash policy they have adopted, and 
proceed to prosecute a peace as vigorously as they have prose- 
cuted the war, the loan would still be indispensable. 

Now, Sir, let it be noted, that by this loan bill we have given 
the Administration the precise amount of pecuniary means 
which the Secretary of the Treasury considered necessary. He 
asked for authority to reissue five millions of Treasury notes. 
We have given it to him. He said that he should need author- 
ity to borrow twenty-three millions more, in case no additional 
revenue was raised, but that if duties were laid on tea and 
coffee, and the land graduation system was adopted, he should 
only require nineteen millions. We have given him the twenty- 
three millions. I moved to reduce the amount to nineteen, and 
the House rejected the motion. Yet now he is found calling 
•upon us for the additional revenue besides ; and the President 
unites with him in a fervent appeal to our patriotism to lay a 
tax upon tea and coffee ! 

The Secretary tell us that these duties are essential to enable 
him to negotiate the loan. It is not so. Sir. You have held out 
such a tempting bait to capitalists, both foreign and domestic, 
by the terms of the loan, that, from present appearances', it will 
be negotiated quite too readily. But, if it were not so, there is 
another and a better way than by the provisions of any new tariff 
bill, by which its negotiation may be secured. 

It is one of the great beauties of this system of loans that it 
appeals to the confidence of the people. It bears the same 
relation to the finances, which the volunteer system bears to the 
military forces of the country. There must be good will towards 
the Government, and something of trust and confidence in its 
policy, or neither of these systems can be successful. Confi- 



604 THE CONQUEST OF MEXICAN TEEEITORY. 

dence is the one thing needful for the public credit ; and this 
confidence must exist in the right quarter. 

The venerable Gallatin has given us a seasonable hint on 
these points, in the pamphlet on the Oregon question which he 
published last year. He tells us in what quarter, and by what 
means, the Government must obtain these loans : 

" There is as yet (says he) but very Httle active circulating capital in the new States i 
they cannot lend ; they, on the contrary, want to borrow money. This can be obtained 
in the shape of loans only from the capitalists of the Atlantic States. A recurrence 
to public documents will show that all the loans of the last war were obtained in that 
quarter." 

And again : 

" When our Government relies on the people for being sustained in making war, its 
confidence must be entire. They must be told the whole truth ; and, if they are really 
in favor of the war, they will cheerfully sustain the Government in all the measures 
necessary to carry it into effect." 

Now, Sir, if the President desires to create an entire confi- 
dence in the public credit, and to render his loans easy of nego- 
tiation, he must let the people of the country understand where 
this war is to end. He must tell them the whole truth. He 
must disclaim these indefinite ideas of national aggrandizement. 
He must abandon the purpose of dismembering Mexico. He 
must dissipate that dark cloud of disunion, which is seen hover- 
ing over us as often as we agitate the question of an extension 
of territory. He must give assurance that peace is to be restored 
and the Union preserved ; and he can then have all the money 
which may be wanted at a moment's warning. This, Sir, is the 
way, and this the only way, of creating real confidence in the 
right quarter. 

But if it were true, Mr. Chairman, that additional taxes were 
necessary at this moment to sustain the public credit, this little 
bill, which has been reported by the Committee of Ways and 
Means, would do little or nothing toward such an end. Why, 
there is something almost ridiculous in the introduction of such 
a bill for such an emergency as the present. Here we are, with 
a public debt of fifty millions already created, and with an 
annual expenditure of more than fifty millions already author- 
ized, and how do we propose to provide for it ? We call upon 



THE CONQUEST OF MEXICAN TERRITORY. 605 

the Secretary for his grand projet, and what does he present to 
us ? A few additional duties on a little iron and coal and sugar 
and on two descriptions of cottons, twenty per cent, on tea and 
coffee, and a graduation of the price of the public lands ! I am 
wrong, Sir. The Secretary of the Treasury disclaims recom- 
mending the duties on iron, and coal, and sugar, and cottons. 
I am not surprised at it either ; for the whole yield of them all 
would be too insignificant to be worthy even of his attention. 
From the best accounts I can get, the duties on one description 
of cottons would yield absolutely nothing, as none of them are 
imported. The Secretary has been loud in his complaints about 
minimums. Sir, this whole bill is a minimum, and a friend near 
me well suggests that it is worthy of a minimum Administra- 
tion. Certainly, it is the very smallest bill that was ever reported 
in any country to meet so great an exigency. Three millions a 
year is the largest estimate which anybody can make of the rev- 
enue which will be derived from it ; it will probably not exceed 
two millions and a half. Seriously, Mr. Chairman, such a bill, 
in my judgment, is more likely to injure the public credit than 
to sustain it. If we do any thing at this moment, we should do 
enough to impress capitalists with the idea that we are not 
afraid to tax. We should go for raising eight or ten millions 
more revenue at the least. With specific duties, and proper 
discriminations, we might easily accomplish that result. And 
until specific duties and proper discriminations are reestablished, 
we shall have no sound, productive, permanent revenue system. 
The Secretary is indeed pluming himself greatly on the opera- 
tion of his new tariff. Undoubtedly, Sir, it has thus far yielded 
somewhat more than was anticipated. But one swallow does 
not make a summer. One month's operation is no test of a 
tariff. Nor is this a moment when any fair calculation can be 
made of its real results. There are too many disturbing causes. 
There is a war on this side of the ocean, and a famine on the 
other; no potatoes in Ireland ; short grain crops all over Europe; 
a second short cotton crop in our Southern States. A general 
derangement of commerce and currency has ensued, which 
happens to enure greatly to our benefit. You might as well 
judge of the ordinary height of the waves by the tossings and 

51* 



606 THE CONQUEST OF MEXICAN TERRITORY. 

heavings of an equinoctial gale, as of the legitimate tendencies 
of the new tariff during such a financial storm as now surrounds 
us. Mr. Walker should employ Mr. Espy to make his calcula- 
tions for the present year. 

Sir, I have no confidence in this new system. The people 
have no confidence in it. It is based upon false principles. It 
defies all experience. It abandons all protection of our own labor ; 
and, sooner or later, it will prove to be utterly insufficient as a 
revenue measure. For one, therefore, I am not for propping it up 
by any such little bill as is now submitted to us. I am not for 
eking out the insufliciencies of a horizontal tariff" by taxes upon 
tea and coffee. I am not for supplying means for an unjust war 
upon a foreign nation, by an unjust war upon our domestic 
industry. I go rather. Sir, for the things which make for peace, 
and the things by which we may build up one another. 



N T E . 



VOTE IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES OX MR. "WINTIIROP'S PROVISO, 

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 23. 



The following Proviso, moved by Mr. Winthrop to be added to tbe bill appro- 
priating money for defraying the expenses of the forces engaged in the present 
war and of the army generally, being under consideration, namely : 

" Provided, further, That these appropriations are made with no view of sanction- 
ing any prosecution of the existing war witli Mexico for the acquisition of territory to 
form new States to be added to the Union, or for the dismemberment in any way of 
the Republic of Mexico : " 

the question on agreeing thereto was taken by yeas and nays and decided 
as follows : — 

Yeas. — Messrs. Abbott, Arnold, Ashmun, Barringer, Bell, Blanchard, j\Iil- 
ton Brown, Buffington, William W. Campbell, Carroll, John G. Chapman, 
Cocke, CoUamer, Cranston, Crozier, Darragh, Delano, Dixon, Dockery, John 
H. Ewing, Edwin H. Ewing, Foot, Gentry, Giddings, Graham, Grider, Grin- 
nell. Hale, Hamj^ton, Harper, Henry, Hilliard, Elias B. Holmes, John W. Hous- 
ton, Samuel D. Hubbard, Hudson, Washington Hunt, Joseph R. Ingersoll, 
Daniel P. King, Thomas B. King, Lewis, McGaughey, McHenry, Mcllvaine, 
Marsh, ISIiller, Moseley, Pendleton, Pollock, Ramsey, Ripley, Julius Rockwell, 
John A. Rockwell, Root, Runk, Schenck, Seaman, Severance, Truman Smith, 
Albert Smith, Caleb B. Smith, Stephens, Strohni, Thibodeaux, Thomasson, 
Benjamin Thompson, Tllden, Toombs, Trumbo, Vance, Vinton, White, Win- 
throp, Woodruff, Wright, Young. — 7G. 

Nays. — Messrs. Stephen Adams, Atkinson, Bcdinger, Benton, Biggs, James 
Black, James A. Black, Bowdon, Bowlin, Boyd, Brinkerhoff, Brockenbrough, 
Brodhead, Wm. G. Brown, Burt, Cathcart, Augustus A. Chapman, Reuben 
Chapman, Chase, Chipman, Clarke, Cobb, Collin, Cottrell, Cullum, Cummins, 
Cunningham, De Mott, Dillingham, Dobbin, Douglass, Dromgoole, Dunlaj), 
Edsall, EUet, Ellsworth, Erdman, Faran, Ficklin, Foster, Fries, Garvin, Giles, 
Goodyear, Gordon, Grover, Hamlin, Harmanson, Hastings, Henley, Hoge, Hop- 



608 NOTE. 

kins, Hough, George S. Houston, Edmund W. Hubard, Hungerford, James B. 
Hunt, Hunter, Charles J. IngersoU, Jenkins, James H. Johnson, Joseph John- 
son, Andrew Johnson, George W. Jones, Seaborn Jones, Kauffman, Kennedy, 
Preston King, Lawrence, Loake, Leffler, La Sere, Ligon, Long, Lumpkin, 
ISIaclay, McClean, ]\IcClelland, McClernand, JSIcCrate, McDaniel, Joseph J. 
McDowell, James ISIcDowell, McKay, John P. Martin, Bai-clay Martin, Morris, 
Moulton, Newton, Niven, Norris, Owen, Parrish, Payne, Perry, Phelps, Pills- 
bury, Reid, Relfe, Ritter, Roberts, Russell, Sawtelle, Sawyer, Scammon, Sed- 
don, Alexander D. Sims, Simpson, Thomas Smith, Robert Smith, Stanton, 
Starkweather, St. John, James Thompson, Jacob Thompson, Thurman, Tibbatts, 
Towns, Tredway, AVentworth, Wick, Williams, Wilmot, Woodward, Yost. — 124. 



ADDRESS ON TAKING THE CHAIR AS SPEAKER. 



ADDRESS DELIVERED IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES OF THE UNITED 

STATES, DECEMBER C, 1S47. 



Gentlemen of the House of Eepeesentatives of the United States, — 

I AM deeply sensible of the honor which you have conferred 
upon me by the vote which has just been announced, and I pray 
leave to express my grateful acknowledgments to those who have 
thought me worthy of so distinguished a mark of their confi- 
dence. 

When I remember by whom this chair has been filled in other 
years, and, still more, when I reflect on the constitutional cha- 
racter of the body before me, I cannot but feel that you have 
assigned me a position worthy of any man's ambition, and far 
above the rightful reach of my own. 

I approach the discharge of its duties with a profound impres- 
sion at once of their dignity and of their difficulty. 

Seven years of service as a member of this branch of the 
National Legislature have more than sufficed to teach me, that 
this is no place of mere formal routine or ceremonious repose. 
Severe labors, perplexing cares, trying responsibilities, await any 
one who is called to it, even under the most auspicious and favor- 
able circumstances. How, then, can I help trembling at the task 
which you have imposed upon me, in the existing condition of 
this House and of the country ? 

In a time of war, in a time of high political excitement, in a 
time of momentous national controversy, I see before me the 
Representatives of the People almost equally divided, not merely 



610 ADDRESS ON TAKING THE CHAIR AS SPEAKER. 

as the votes of this morning have already indicated, in their pre- 
ference for persons, but in opinion and in principle, on many of 
the most important questions on which they have assembled to 
deliberate. 

May I not reasonably claim, in advance, from you all, some- 
thing more than an ordinary measure of forbearance and indulg- 
ence, for whatever of inability I may manifest in meeting the 
exigencies and embarrassments which I cannot hope to escape ? 
And may I not reasonably implore, with something more than 
common fervency, upon your labors and upon my own, the bless- 
ing of that Almighty Power, whose recorded attribute it is that 
" He maketh men to be of one mind in a house ? " 

Let us enter, gentlemen, upon our work of legislation with a 
solemn sense of our responsibility to God and to our country. 
However we may be divided on questions of immediate policy, 
we are united by the closest ties of permanent interest and per- 
manent obligation. We are the representatives of twenty mil- 
lions of people, bound together by common laws and a common 
liberty. A common flag floats daily over us, on which there is 
not one of us who would see a stain rest, and from which there 
is not one of us who would see a star struck. And we have a 
common Constitution, to which the oaths of allegiance, which 
it will be my first duty to administer to you, will be only, I am 
persuaded, the formal expression of those sentiments of devotion 
which are already cherished in all our hearts. 

There may be differences of opinion as to the powers which 
this Constitution confers upon us ; but the purposes for which 
it was created are inscribed upon its face, in language which can- 
not be misunderstood. It was ordained and established " to form 
a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquil- 
lity, provide for the common defence, promote the general wel- 
fare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and to our 
posterity." 

Union, justice, domestic tranquillity, the common defence, the 
general welfare, and the security of liberty for us and for those 
who shall come after us, are thus the great objects for which we 
are to exercise whatever powers have been intrusted to us. And 
I hazard nothing in saying that there have been few periods in 



ADDRESS ON TAKING THE CHAIR AS SPEAKER. 611 

our national history, when the eyes of the whole people have 
been turned more intently and more anxiously towards the Capi- 
tol, than they are at this moment, to see what is to be done, here 
and now, for the vindication and promotion of these lofty ends. 

Let us resolve, then, that those eyes shall at least witness on 
our part, duties discharged with diligence, deliberations conducted 
with dignity, and efforts honestly and earnestly made for the 
peace, prosperity, and honor of the country. 

I shall esteem it the highest privilege of my public life, if I 
shall be permitted to contribute any thing to these results, by a 
faithful and impartial administration of the office which I have 
now accepted. 



NOTE. 



The following correspondence belongs to the history of the election of 
Speaker, at the opening of the 30th Congress. 

56 COLEIIAK'S, WashiXGTON, 

December 5, 1847. 

Dear Sir : It would give me pleasure to aid, by my vote, in placing you in 
the Chair of the House of Representatives. But I have no personal hopes or 
fears to dictate my course in the matter, and the great consideration for me 
must be that of the pohcy which the Speaker will impress on the action of the 
House. 

Not to trouble you with suggestions as to subordinate points, there are some 
leadincr questions on which it may be presumed that you have a settled purpose. 
May I respectfully inquire, whether, if elected Speaker, it is your intention, — 

So to constitute the Committees of Foreign Relations and of "Ways and 
Means as to arrest the existing war ? 

So to constitute the Committee on the Judiciary, as to favor the repeal of the 
law of February 12, 1793, which denies trial by jury to persons charged with 
being slaves ; to give a fair and favorable consideration to the question of the 
repeal of those Acts of Congress which now sustain slavery in this District ; and 
to further such measures as may be in the power of Congress to remedy the 
grievances of which ]\Iassachusetts complains at the hands of South Carolina, in 
respect to ill-treatment of her citizens ? 

I should feel much obliged to you for a reply at your early convenience, and 
I should be happy to be permitted to coimnuuicatc it, or its substance, to some 
o-entlemen who entertain similar views to mine, on this class of questions. 

I am, dear Sir, with great personal esteem, your friend and servant, 

Joiix G. Palfrey. 



Washington, Coleman's Hotel, 
December 5, 1847. 

Dear Sir : Your letter of to-day has this moment been handed to me. 
I am greatly obliged by the disposition you express " to aid in placing me in 
the Chair of the House of Representatives." But I must be perfectly candid in 



NOTE. C13 

saying to you, that if I am to occupy that Chair, I must go into it without pledges 
of any ^ort. 

I have not sought the place. I have solicited no man's vote. At a meeting 
of the Whig membci'S of the House last evening, (at which, however, I believe 
you were not present,) I was formally nominated as the Whig candidate for 
Speaker, and I have accepted the nomination. 

But I have luiiformly said to all who have inquired of me, that my policy in 
organizing the House must be sought for in my general conduct and character 
as a public man. 

I have been for seven years a member of Congress from our common State of 
Massachusetts. My votes are on record. My speeches are in print. If they 
have not been such as to inspire confidence in my course, nothing that I could 
get up for the occasion, in the shape of pledges or declarations of purpose, ought 
to do so. 

Still less could I feel it consistent with my own honor, after having received 
and accepted a general nomination, and just on the eve of the election, to frame 
answers to specific questions, like those which you have proposed, to be shown 
to a few gentlemen, as you suggest, and to be withheld from the great body of 
the Whigs. 

Deeply, therefore, as I should regret to lose the distinction which the Wliig-s 
in Congress have offered to me, and through me to New England, for want of 
the aid of a Massachusetts vote, I must yet respectfully decline any more direct 
reply to the interrogatories which your letter contains. 

I remain, with every sentiment of personal esteem, 

Your friend and servant, 

Robert C. Winthrop. 

Hon. J. G. Palfrey, ^'c.,^'c. 



52 



THE DEATH OE JOHN QTJINCY ADAMS. 



AXXOUNCEMEXT OF THE DEATH OF EX-PRESIDENT ADAJIS TO THE HOUSE 
OF KEPRESENTATIVES OF THE UNITED STATES, FEBRUARY 24, 1848, 



Gextlemex of the House op Eepeesentatives op the United States, — 

It has been thought fit that the Chair should announce offi- 
cially to the House, an event already known to the members 
individually, and which has filled all our hearts with sadness. 

A seat on this floor has been vacated, towards which all eyes 
have been accustomed to turn with no common interest. 

A voice has been hushed forever in this Hall, to which all ears 
have been wont to listen with profound reverence. 

A venerable form has faded from our sight, around which we 
have daily clustered with an aflfectionate regard. 

A name has been stricken from the roll of the living states- 
men of our land, which has been associated, for more than half 
a century, with the highest civil service, and the loftiest civil re- 
nown. 

On Monday, the 21st instant, John Quincy Adams sunk in 
his seat, in presence of us all, owing to a sudden illness, from 
which he never recovered ; and he died, in the Speaker's room, 
at a quarter past seven o'clock last evening, with the officers of 
the House and the delegation of his own Massachusetts around 
him. 

Whatever advanced age, long experience, great ability, vast 
learning, accumulated public honors, a spotless private charac- 
ter, and a firm religious faith, could do, to render any one an 
object of interest, respect, and admiration, they had done for 
this distinguished person ; and interest, respect, and admiration 



THE DEATH OF JOHN QUINCY ADAMS. 615 

are but feeble terms to express the feelings, with which the 
members of this House and the People of this country have long 
regarded him. 

After a life of eighty years, devoted from its earliest maturity 
to the public service, he has at length gone to his rest. He has 
been privileged to die at his post ; to fall while in the discharge 
of his duties ; to expire beneath the roof of the Capitol ; and 
to have his last scene associated forever, in history, with the 
birthday of that illustrious Patriotj whose just discernment 
brought him first into the service of his country. 

The close of such a life, under such circumstances, is not an 
event for unmingled emotions. "We cannot find it in our hearts 
to regret, that he has died as he has died. He himself could 
have desired no other end. " This is the end of earth," were 
his last words, uttered on the day on which he fell. But we 
might almost hear him exclaiming, as he left us — in a language 
hardly less familiar to him than his native tongue — •' Hoc est, 
7iimiriim, magis feliciter de vita migrare, quam mo7-iP 

It is for others to suggest what honors shall be paid to his 
memory. No acts of ours are necessary to his fame. But it 
may be due to ourselves and to the country, that the national 
sense of his character and services should be fitly commemo- 
rated. 



HOETICULTURE. 



A SPEECH AT THE FESTIVAL OF THE MASSACHUSETTS HORTICULTURAL 
SOCIETY IN FAXEUIL HALL, BOSTON, SEPTEMBER 22, 1848- 



[lu reply to the following toast, proposed by the Hon. Marshall P. TMlder, Presi- 
dent of the Society, — " Winthrop. the first Governor of Massacliusetts — Tlie good stock 
which he planted more than two centuries ago, bears fruit in this generation -which 
speaks for itself.''] 

I WISH that it could speak for itself, Mr. President! Most 
heartily do I wish that the fruit of that old stock to which you 
have so kindly alluded, could speak for itself in a manner 
worthy of this occasion, — could find language for the senti- 
ments with which a scene like this has filled all our hearts. It 
is so long, however, since I was at liberty to speak for myself, — 
I have so long, of late, been a doomed listener to the not always 
very inspiring speeches of others, — that I am almost afraid that 
my faculty, if I ever had any, has flown. But with whatever 
words I can find, I desire to offer my congratulations to this 
Society, on the eminent success of the exhibition which is now 
brought to a close. 

I think you will agree with me, ladies and gentlemen, that a 
richer display of horticultural products has rarely been witnessed 
by any of us. I have had a recent opportunity of seeing some 
of the horticultural exhibitions of other climes. It is hardly 
more than a twelvemonth, since it was my good fortune to be 
present at more than one of the famous flower-shows of London 
and its vicinity. I know not what hidden beauties might have 
revealed themselves on these occasions to a more scientific eye, 
— what prodigies of art might have been discovered by those 
who knew how to look for them, — I can only speak of the 
impressions produced on a superficial observer. I saw there 



HORTICULTURE. 617 

magnificent collections of plants, such as I never saw before, 
such as I have never seen since. Not a few of them were 
pointed out to me as original products of our own soil; but I 
confess that they had been so improved by cultivation, that it 
must have required a very practised eye, or an exceedingly pa- 
triotic pair of spectacles, to have emboldened any one to claim 
them as Native American productions. But as to fruits, I saw 
no exhibition of them anywhere, which for variety, perfection, 
or profusion, could be compared with what we have seen in this 
Hall, during the last two or three days. 

Certainly, Mr. President, we have never beheld the like in 
these parts before. A few years ago, we all remember that a 
little room in Tremont street was all too wide for your annual 
shows. But you have gone on so rapidly, adding triumph to 
triumph — at one moment producing a new apple, at another a 
few more pears, at a third "a little more grape" — that your 
own spacious Horticultural rooms have now become too small, 
and old Faneuil Hall itself can hardly stretch its arms wide 
enough, to embrace all the spoils of your victories ! 

And what shall I say of the festival by which your exhibition 
is now closed and crowned ? Who does not feel it a privilege to 
be here? Which one of us, especially, that has been accustomed 
to associate meetings in this place only with subjects of political 
contention and party strife, can fail to appreciate the harmony 
and beauty of the scene before him ? Never, surely, was there 
combined a greater variety of delightful circumstances. It would 
be difficult to decide for which of our senses you have provided 
the most luxurious repast. Fruit, flowers, music, fair faces, 
sparkling eyes, wit, eloquence, and poetry, have all conspired to 
lend their peculiar enchantment to the hour. 

But it would be doing great injustice to your Association, to 
estimate its claims upon the consideration and gratitude of the 
community, by the mere success of its exhibitions or the brilliancy 
of its festivals. We owe them a far deeper debt for their influence 
in disseminating a taste for one of the purest and most refined 
pleasures of life, and for their exertions in diffusing the know- 
ledge of an art so eminently calculated to elevate the moral 
character of society. 

52* 



618 HORTICULTURE. 

Horticulture, indeed, does little to supply the physical wants 
of man. The great crops and harvests by which the world is fed, 
are the products of a sterner treatment of the soil, — ever-honored 
Agriculture, always the first of arts. But " man does not live by 
bread alone." There is food for the soul, the mind, the heart, 
no less essential to his true subsistence, and required not merely 
by the educated and refined, but by all who have souls, minds, or 
hearts within them. And whence can the toiling millions of our 
race obtain a more abundant or a more wholesome supply of 
this food, than from the beauties of nature as developed at their 
own doors, and by their own hands, by the exquisite processes 
of horticulture ? 

It has been said that an undevout astronomer is mad. But 
we need not look up to the skies for incentives to devotion. We 
need "not employ telescopes to find evidences of Beneficence. 
There are 

" Stars of the morning, dew-drops, which the Sun 
Impearls on every leaf and every flower," 

whose lessons are legible to the unassisted eye. The flowers, them- 
selves, with their gorgeous hues and inimitable odors, and which 
seem, in the economy of nature, to have no other object but to 
minister to the gratification and delight of man, — who can 
resist their quiet teachings ? What companions are they to 
those who will only take them into company, and cherish their 
society, and listen to their charming voices I Who ever parts 
from them without pain, that has once experienced their dis- 
interested and delightful friendship ? 

I know not in the whole range of ancient or modern poetry, a 
strain more touching or more true to nature, than that in which 
the great English bard has presented Eve bidding farewell to her 

flowers : — 

O flowers, 
That never will in other climate grow, 
My early visitation, and my last 
At even, which I bred up with tender hand 
From the first opening bud. and gave ye names ! 
Wlio now shall rear ye to the sun, or rank 
Your tribes, and water from the ambrosial fount ? " 

We know not what were those flowers, that never could in 



HORTICULTURE. 619 

other climate grow. We may know hereafter. But such as we 
have, there are daughters of Eve here present, I doubt not, with 
whom, to be deprived of them, would wellnigh partake of the 
bitterness of a Paradise lost. 

But let me hasten to relieve you, ladies and gentlemen, from 
the too sombre, if not too sentimental, strain into which I have 
been betrayed. My reverend friends who have preceded me 
will already have regarded me as poaching on their premises. 
Let me add but a single other idea, as the subject of the senti- 
ment which I shall offer in conclusion. 

We are accustomed to designate certain arts as the Fine Arts, 
and I would be the last to disparage their claim to this distin- 
guished title. They furnish to our halls of state and to the 
mansions of the wealthy, paintings and sculpture which cannot 
be too highly prized. But Horticulture, in its most comprehen- 
sive sense, is emphatically the Fine Art of common life. It is 
eminently a Republican Fine Art. It distributes its productions 
with equal hand to the rich and the poor. Its implements may 
be wielded by every arm, and its results appreciated by every 
eye. It decorates the dwelling of the humblest laborer with 
undoubted originals, by the oldest masters, and places within his 
daily view, fruit-pieces and flower-pieces, such as Van Huysum 
never painted, and landscapes such as Poussin could only copy. 
Let me say, then, — 

Horticulture — Its best Exhibitions are in the village garden and the cottage win- 
dow ; and its best Festivals in the humble homes which it adorns, and in the humble 
hearts which it refines and elevates. 



THE CITY OF WASHINGTON. 



A SPEECH MADE AT A COMPLIMENTARY DINNER GIVEN BY CITIZENS OF 
WASHINGTON TO MEMBERS OF THE THIRTIETH CONGRESS, DECEMBER 20, 

1848. 



[In reply to the following toast, proposed by the Honorable "W. W. Seaton, Mayor 
of the City, — •' The Thirtieth Congress: Honor and harmony to its counsels ; — happi- 
ness and prosperity to its members."] 

I AM greatly honored, Mr. Mayor and Gentlemen, in being 
called on to respond, in the presence of so many older and abler 
public servants, to the sentiment just proposed. I thank you, 
personally, for the privilege of participating in these agreeable 
festivities ; and I thank you, officially, for the compliment which 
you have offered to the two branches of the National Legislature. 
I am sincerely glad that this thirtieth Congress of the United 
States, however distinguished or undistinguished it may have 
been in other respects, has been prompted to do so much that is 
liberal and acceptable for the District of Columbia. You are 
very little indebted for these appropriations to one, who, under 
all ordinary circumstances of legislation, is deprived both of voice 
and vote ; but I can truly say that there are no appropriations to 
which I have affixed that attesting signature, which is all that is 
left to me, with a truer satisfaction. 

I do not know, however, that members of Congress are entitled 
to any very high commendation for their liberality to this District. 
It is a liberality which costs them nothing. They can afford to 
be generous — they can certainly afford to be just — with other 
people's money ; and more especially when it comes to them in 
such ample streams as now, under the auspices of the honorable 



THE CITY OF WASHINGTON. 621 

Secretary at your side, (Hon. R. J. Walker.) They have, more- 
over, the strongest personal interest in promoting the welfare and 
prosperity of this particular part of the District. The presence 
of the distinguished Senator from Missouri (Mr. Benton) reminds 
us, that to many of them this city is their home for no inconsider- 
able part of their lives. And many more of them, we know, 
would be glad to make it their home for a much longer period 
than they do, if they could only succeed in securing the unbroken 
confidence and support of their constituents, as he has done, for 
a term of thirty years. Not a few of us live here, and not a few 
of us, I am sorry to say, die here. We partake of all your 
advantages and of all your disadvantages. If your streets are 
rough and out of repair, our bones are shaken, as well as yours, 
and our necks are liable to be broken. If they are badly lighted at 
night, we are as likely as you to stumble and fall into the ditch. 
And if you have no good schools, our children, as well as your 
own, may be deprived of a seasonable and satisfactory education. 
But apart altogether, Mr. Mayor, from any selfish considera- 
tions of this sort, we all ought to take a pride, and I trust that 
we all do take a pride, as Americans and as patriots, in the pros- 
perity and welfare of the capital of the Republic. Most heartily 
do I respond to the sentiment expressed by the Secretary of the 
Treasury, in his letter, published this morning, communicating 
to Congress the annual report of the Land Office, and in which 
the patronage of the National Government is invoked for the 
public schools of this District. Most cordially do I concur with 
him in the idea which he suggests, that this city should be made 
a fit representative of the civilization and refinement and true 
greatness of our country. It already, perhaps, furnishes a pretty 
fair sample of the country in one respect. As a city of " magnifi- 
cent distances," it admirably illustrates the almost immeasurable 
extents over which the Republic is so rapidly reaching. But it 
should portray in miniature something of what our country 
ought to be, and of what, by the blessing of God, it is to be, 
morally as well as physically. Its arts and sciences, its literature 
and learning, should have their emblems and illustrations here. 
Here should be the model schools, the model charities, the model 
libraries, the model prisons of our land ; the model institutions of 



622 THE CITY OF WASHINGTON. 

every sort, for education, benevolence, reformation, and govern- 
ment. Whatever American architecture can do, should be exhi- 
bited in our public buildings. Whatever American painting 
and sculpture can do, should be displayed in commemorating 
here the great deeds and the great men of our history. 

This, Sir, was evidently the spirit in which your city was 
originally laid out and founded by the Father of his Country 
and his illustrious compeers. We see it in the length and breadth 
of your avenues, in the noble squares which they reserved for 
public purposes, and in the fine proportions and ample dimen- 
sions of the Capitol and the Executive Mansion. We know it, 
too, from their own predictions. They looked forward to the 
time when this city should be a kind of American Zion, — beauti- 
ful for situation, the joy of the whole earth, — to which all the 
tribes should annually come up, and find fresh impulses to patri- 
otism, and fresh incentives to Union, in the beauty and grandeur 
of a common temple. They looked forward to the day, when 
all men should find here a City worthy of the great objects to 
which it has been dedicated, and not altogether unworthy of the 
I incomparable name by which it has been called. 
— We all rejoice, I am sure, in witnessing some first approaches 
to a realization of this idea, in the improvements which have 
marked your progress during a few years past, — in the erection 
of a National Observatory, in the foundation of a National 
Museum, in the commencement of a National Monument, and in 
the establishment of the National and the Smithsonian Institutes. 
I cannot name the Smithsonian Institute, however, without 
expressing the hope that, if the capital of this Republic is ever to 
be the seat of a great institution of learning and science, — if this 
long-cherished wish of Washington is at length to be accom- 
plished — it may not be wholly owing to the dying bequest 
of a munificent foreigner. I have no objection to the importa- 
tion of a little foreign patronage for such an object, but I trust 
/ that even the Secretary of the Treasury himself, will regard it 

as a venial violation of his free-trade principles, if I advocate the 
encouragement of the domestic article also. 

Once more let me thank you, Sir, in the name of the mem- 
bers of Congress around me, for the hospitalities of this occa- 



THE CITY OF WASHINGTON. 623 

sion, and for the many other hospitalities and kindnesses, public 
and private, which we have all received at your hands in time 
past ; and let me relieve your patience, without further delay, 
by proposing to the company as a sentiment, — 

" The City of Washington, and its accomplished and excellent Mayor, Mr. Seaton." 



EEPLY TO A YOTE OF THANKS. 



A SPEECH DELIVERED IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES OF THB 
tJNITED STATES, ON THE FINAL ADJOURNMENT OF THE THIRTIETH 
CONGRESS, MARCH, 4, 1819. 



Gentlemen op the House of Representatives. — 

The hour has arrived which terminates our relations to the 
country, and our relations to each other, as members of the 
Thirtieth Congress ; and you have already pronounced the word 
which puts an end at once to my vocation and to your own. 

But neither the usage of the occasion, nor my own feelings, 
will allow me to leave the Chair, without a word of acknow- 
ledgment, and a word of farewell, to those with whom I have 
been so long associated, and by whom I have been so highly 
honored. 

Certainly, gentlemen, I should subject myself to a charge of 
great ingratitude, were I not to thank you for the Resolution in 
reference to my official services, which you have placed upon the 
records within a few hours past. 

Such a resolution, I need not say, is the most precious testi- 
monial which any presiding officer can receive, and affords the 
richest remuneration for any labors which it may have cost. 

It did not require, however, this formal tribute at your hands, 
to furnish me with an occasion of grateful acknowledgment to 
you all. I am deeply sensible, that no intentions, however hon- 
est, and no efforts, however earnest, could have carried me safely 
/ and successfully through with the duties which have been 
imposed upon me, had I not been seconded and sustained, from 
first to last, by your kind cooperation and friendly forbearance. 

I beg you, then, to receive my most hearty thanks, not merely 
for so generous an appreciation of my services, but for the uni- 



REPLY TO A VOTE OF THANKS. 625 

form courtesy and confidence which you have manifested towards 
me, during my whole official term, and which have done 
so much to lighten the labors and relieve the responsibilities 
which are inseparable from the Chair of this House. I can 
honestly say, that I have endeavored, to the best of my ability, 
to fulfil the pledges with which I entered upon this arduous sta- 
tion, and to discharge its complicated and difficult duties with- 
out partiality and without prejudice. Nor am I conscious of 
having given just cause of imputation or offence to any mem- 
ber of the House. If there be one, however, towards whom I 
have seemed, at any moment, to exhibit any thing of injustice, 
or any thing of impatience, I freely offer him the only reparation 
in my power, in this public expression of my sincere regret. 

We have been associated, gentlemen, during a most eventful 
period in the history of our country and of the world. It would 
be difficult to designate another era in the modern annals of 
mankind, which has been signalized by so rapid a succession of 
startling political changes. Let us rejoice that while the powers 
of the earth have almost everywhere else been shaken, — that 
while more than one of the mightiest monarchies and stateliest 
empires of Europe have tottered or have fallen, — our own Ameri- 
can Republic has stood firm. Let us rejoice at the evidence 
which has thus been furnished to the friends of liberty through- 
out the world, of the inherent stability of institutions, which are 
founded on the rock of a written constitution, and which are 
sustained by the will of a free and intelligent people. And let us 
hope and trust — as I, for one, most fervently and confidently do 
— that, by the blessing of God, upon prudent, conciliatory, and 
patriotic counsels, every cause of domestic dissension and frater- 
nal discord may be speedily done away, and that the States 
and the people, whose representatives we are, may be bound 
together forever in a firm, cordial, and indissoluble Union. 

Offering once more to you all, my most grateful acknow- 
ledgments of your kindness, and my best wishes for your indi- 
vidual health and happiness, I proceed to the performance of the 
only duty which remains to me, by announcing, as I now do. 

That the House of Representatives of the United States 
stands adjourned, sine die. 

53 



NOTE. 



INVITATIOX TO A rUBLIC DINNER. 

BosTOX, August 28, 1848. 
Dear Sir : A large number of "\Aniigs, of the SufTolk Congressional Dis- 
trict, among your strongest personal and political friends, " entertaining a liigh 
respect for the character and abilities of their distinguished Representative in 
Congress, and a deep sense of gratitude for the services which he has rendered, 
and the honor he has reflected upon the State and the Union, by his faithful and 
successful discharge of the arduous duties of Speaker of the House of Repre- 
sentatives, during a long and laborious session," have requested us to tender you, 
in their behalf, a public dinner, at such time and place as may be most agree- 
able to you. 

Joining, to that of our friends, our own earnest and sincere desire that you 
may find it convenient to accede to their rcfjuest. 

We are, with considerations of high regard. 

Your friends and obedient servants. 



Abbott Lawrence, 
James Clark, 
F. B. Crowninshield, 
Albert Fearing, 
Nathan Apple ton, 
William Schouler, 
George More}-, 
N. W. Coffin," 
P. Greely, Jr., 
Bradley N. Cummings, 

Hon. Robert C. WiniJirop, Boston. 



F. W. Lincoln, Jr., 
Philo S. Shelton, 
Peter Harvey, 
George W. Crockett, 
Josiah Bradlee, 
J. Richardson, 
John H. Eastburn, 
B. S. Rotch, 
Francis Bacon, 
C'harles H. MUls. 



ANSAVER. 



Boston, September 15, 1848. 
Gentlemen : Absence from home prevented me from receiving your most 
obliging communication of the 2Sth ult., until a late day. 



NOTE, 627 

I hasten now to acknowledge it, and to assure you of my deep sensibility to 
the compliment which it contains. 

I have, indeed, been called to the discharge of " arduous duties during a long 
and laborious session " of Congress. It would not be easy to overestimate the 
labors which belong to the office of Speaker of the House of Representatives 
of the United States. Nothing could afford me higher satisfaction than to 
know, that, in the judgment of the personal and political friends whom you 
represent, my performance of the duties of that office has been feithful and 
successful, and that it has reflected no dishonor, either on our own Common- 
wealth, or on the Country at large. 

Such an expression, I need hardly say, is peculiarly welcome to me from my 
immediate constituents, — implying, as it does, that they have not been extreme 
to note any inattention to their local interests, Avhich may have resulted from 
the engrossinsf character of the duties of the Chair. 

Boston has been accustomed to no common services in the National Councils. 
Few Districts in the Union can point to such a succession of distinguished and 
devoted Representatives. Fisher Ames, Harrison Gray Otis, William Eustis, 
Josiah Quincy, Artemas Ward, James Lloyd, Jonathan Mason, Benjamin Gor- 
ham, Daniel Webster, Nathan Appleton, Abbott Lawrence, Richard Fletcher ; 
— this is, indeed, a catalogue of stars, to which any one may be proud to have 
been added. • 

If, on retiring from office, at the close of my present term, — when I shall 
have represented the people of Boston in Congress longer than any one of my 
predecessors, since the adoption of the Constitution, — my name shall not be 
thought unworthy of some humble association, in the kind regards of my fellow 
citizens, with the names of these eminent men, the measui-e of my political 
ambition will be full. 

Be pleased to communicate to those, in whose behalf you have addressed me, 
my cordial thanks for the honor which they have done me, and to assure them, 
that while I decline to be made the subject of any ceremonious entertainment, I 
shall always cherish the most grateful remembrance of their courtesy and kind- 
ness. 

I am, gentlemen, with the highest respect and esteem, 

Your faithful friend and servant, 

Robert C. Winthrop. 

Hon. Abbott Lawrence, and otlters. 



LETTER TO THE WHIG NOMINATING CONVENTION, DECLINING A RE- 
ELECTION. 

Boston, October 9th, 1848. 
Gentlemen: I have the honor to acknowledge your obliging communica- 
tion of the 5th instant, informing me that I have been nominated, unanimously 
and by acclamation, as a candidate for reelection to Congress. 



G28 NOTE. 

I am most deeply indebted to the members of the T\Tiig Ward and County 
Convention for so generous an expression of their confidence ; and I pray you 
to present to them all, and to accept for yourselves, an assurance of my pro- 
found gratitude. 

It has been for some time past, and is still, my sincere and earnest desire to 
be relieved from further service in the House of Representatives of the United 
States. 

"Willi this view, I addressed a letter to the Chairman of your Convention, in 
July last, announcing my determination not to be a candidate for reelection. 

The opinion of himself and many other most respected political and personal 
friends, that the peculiar circumstances of our party, at that moment, made it 
extremely undesirable that such an announcement should be made public, in- 
duced me to assent to its beinfj -withheld. But mv views and feelinsis have 
underjTone no change, and I am still strong and sincere in the desire to retire 
from Congress on the 4tli of March next, when I shall have comj^leted a nine 
years' service as the Representative of Boston. 

It is urged upon me, however, by yourselves, and by other distinguished 
Whigs, whose opinions I am bound to respect, that under the peculiar circum- 
stances of the present campaign, the nomination of a new candidate would be 
difficult and dangerous ; and that, by insisting on my purpose to decline a re- 
election, I may jeopard, to some extent, the success of my party, in other and 
far more imjjortant particulars. 

It is suggested to me, moreover, that a full year will intervene between the 
election and the commencement of the new term of Congressional service ; and 
that, if I should feel obliged to resign my place in the course of that time, there 
may be an opportunity of filling it under more auspicious circumstances. 

I am quite unwilling, gentlemen, to give too ready an ear to these suggestions, 
lest 1 should seem to arrogate to myself something of popularity or influence 
which I do not possess. But I do not hesitate to say, that if a well-considered 
belief should be found to exist, among those who are authorized to act for the 
Whigs of this District, that the use of my name would be of any material im- 
portance to the success of their efforts, and more particularly to the choice of 
the Taylor and Fillmore electoral ticket, I would willingly make any sacrifice 
of personal feeling, and leave myself at the disposal of my friends. I would 
not desert those who have never deserted me : still less would I abandon those 
great national interests and principles, for which we have so long contended, 
and which, in my judgment, can only be vindicated, at this moment, by the 
election of General Taylor to the Presidency of the United States. 

AVith these explanations, I desire to refer the whole subject once more to the 
free and unembarrassed decision of the Convention, by declining the nomina- 
tion which they have tendered me. I do so in the earnest hope that they may 
be induced to excuse me from further service, and in the honest conviction that 
they can readily find a successor, Avho will at once bring more weight to the 
ticket, and more ability to the oflice. 

This letter is not intended for publication ; but perhaps you can bring my. 



NOTE. G29 

views before the Convention in no better way, than by reading it at their next 
meeting. 

Begging you, once more, to assure them of my heartfelt gratitude for all their 
kindness and confidence, and to receive for yourselves my best thanks for the 
complimentary terms of your connnunication, 

I remain, Gentlemen, most respectfully and faithfully, 

Your friend and servant, 

Robert C. Wintiirop. 
Col. T. C. Amory, and others, Commillee. 



RESOLUTIONS OF THE CONVENTION, OCTOBER II, 1848. 

Resolved, That we have learned, with deep regret, that the Hon. Robert C. 
Winthrop, now representing this District in the Congress of the United States, 
has expressed a desire to be relieved from further service in that important sta- 
tion, which he has so long filled, with honor to himself and satisfaction to the 
country, and purposes declining a renomination. 

Resolved, That in the opinion of this Convention, such a step would be frau_o-ht 
with great danger and serious injury to the best interests of the Whig cause, 
and calculated to affect unfavorably the result of our labors in the Presidential 
canvass and great political struggle about to take place. 

Resolved, That we know of no person so likely to unite the votes of the 
Whig party in this District at the present time, or who, if elected, will exercise 
a more salutary influence at Washington, than our present honorable Repre- 
sentative ; and that it is our earnest wish that he would reconsider the subject, 
and thus preserve the Whig party, at this crisis, from the difliculties and danoers 
inseparable from the selection of any new candidate ; and with a view to effect 
if possible, this most desirable object, this Convention do now, renewedly and 
unanimously, renominate the Hon. Robert C. Winthrop to represent the First 
Congressional District in the next Congress of these United States, and respect- 
fully soUcit his acceptance thereof. 

Mr. Winthrop accepted the nomination, and was reelected by a majority of 
about four thousand. 



53* 



PERSONAL YINDICATION. 

A SPEECH DELIVERED IN THE HOUSE OF KEPRESEXTATIVES OF THE 
UNITED STATES, IN COMMITTEE OF THE WHOLE ON THE STATE OF 
THE UNION, FEBRUARY 21, 1S50. 



I DO not rise, Mr. Chairman, to enter elaborately into the 
general discussion to which the annual message of the President 
of the United States has given occasion. But finding myself 
under an unexpected necessity of leaving my seat for a week or 
two, I have been unwilling to go, without making a few remarks, 
which I feel to be due to my own position and character. 

I have abstained, thus far, from any expression of opinion or 
declaration of purpose, in regard to the unfortunate sectional 
controversies by which our country is now agitated. I have 
done so designedly, and for many reasons, satisfactory to myself, 
if to nobody else. 

In the first place, Sir, I desired to wait until the excitement 
growing out of that protracted struggle for the Speakership, — 
to which, by the unmerited favor of my friends, I was so promi- 
nent a party, — had passed away from the minds of all who 
were engaged in it ; and until I could express myself fully and 
fearlessly upon these controverted topics, without the suspicion of 
being influenced by any thing of private resentment or personal 
disappointment.* 

In the second place, Sir, I desired to wait until something of 

*The memorable contest for the Speakership of the thirty-first Congress began 
3:)cccmber .3(1, and ended, after si.rli/-tlii-cc ballotiiigs, Deoembcr 22d, 1849. The final 
vote stood thus: for llowell C'olil) 102, for K. C. AVintlirop 100, scattering 20. 
A llcsoliition had licen previously adopted that, on this trial, a majority of the whole 
number should not be necessary for a choice, and Mr. Cobb was accordingly declared 
Speaker. 



PERSONAL VINDICATION. 631 

that fervent and flaming heat, which had been so evidently 
brought here from what may well be termed " tlie warm and 
sunny South," had abated ; until the angry passions, which 
seemed pent up within so many bosoms at the outset of the 
session, had found vent through the safe and wholesome channel 
of debate ; and until there could be a chance that a calm and 
dispassionate voice from " the cold and calculating North " 
might be listened to with some degree of patient attention. 

In the third place. Sir, I desired to wait until matters should 
be rather .more clearly and fully developed; until all the circum- 
stances of the case should be before us ; until we should have 
been able to take an observation of the precise position of the 
precious vessel in which we are all embarked ; until we could 
ascertain, if possible, what is the real length, and breadth, and 
height, and depth, of that fearful chasm, that yawning abyss, 
upon the dizzy brink of which, we are told, the Ship of State is 
even now poising herself; until we could learn, too, what course 
might be proposed by older, and abler, and more experienced 
hands, for, extricating her from peril; and until, especially, we 
might hear distinctly, above the roar of the elements and the 
rattling of the shrouds, the voice of the responsible man at the 
helm, — the man who has been placed at the helm by a majority 
of the crew, with my own cordial concurrence, and who, by the 
blessing of God, I hope, and trust, and believe, is destined to be 
hailed by us all hereafter as " the Pilot who has weathered the 
storm I " 

These, Mr. Chairman, are some of the views with which I 
have thus far abstained, and would gladly have still longer 
abstained, from any participation in that strife of tongues which 
has so long been raging around us, — a strife, let me say, which 
has seemed to me likely to have no more important or practical 
issue, than that which was chronicled by one of the sacred his- 
torians in regard to a quarrel among the Hebrew tribes, when he 
summed up the whole matter by saying, — " and the words of 
the men of Judah were fiercer than the words of the men of 
Israel." 

But, Sir, I have not been permitted to pursue this expectant 
system, as an honorable member of the medical faculty near me. 



632 PERSONAL VINDICATION. 

(Mr. Venable,) would probably call it, — I have not, I say, been 
permitted to pursue this course of silent observation without 
interruption. It appears to have been the studious policy of a 
few members of this House to drag me into the debate, whether I 
would or no. Not satisfied with having accomplished my defeat 
as a candidate for reelection to the Speaker's chair, — a defeat, 
Sir, which, in all its personal incidents and consequences I 
have ever regarded as the most fortunate of triumphs, and 
over which no one of my enemies has rejoiced more heartily 
than myself, — not satisfied with the accomplishment of this 
result, they have made it their special business to provoke and 
taunt me by unworthy reflections upon my political and official 
conduct ; and more than one of them has not scrupled to assail 
me with the coarsest and most unwarrantable personalities. 

It is my purpose. Sir, at this moment, to notice some of these 
unmannerly assaults ; and no one will be surprised, I think, if I 
should be found doing so in no very mincing or measured terms. 

Indeed, Mr. Chairman, both the House and the country will 
bear witness, that I have been placed in a somewhat extraordi- 
nary position during the present session of Congress. Hardly 
had I reached the Capital, before I found myself held up, at the 
length of three or four columns, in the Democratic organ of this 
city, as a desperate Abolitionist. The Abolition papers, in 
reply, exhibited me at equal length, as, indeed, they had often 
done before, as a rank pro-slavery man. The honorable mem- 
ber from Tennessee, (Mr. Andrew Johnson,) coming next to the 
onslaught, and doing me the favor to rehearse before my face a 
speech which he had delivered behind my back at the last 
session, arraigned me in the most ferocious terms as having 
prostituted the prerogatives of the Chair to sectional purposes, 
and as having framed all my committees in a manner and with 
a view to do injustice to the South. The honorable member 
from Ohio, (Mr. Giddings,) following him, after a due delay, 
denounced me with equal violence, as having packed the most 
important of those committees for the purpose of betraying the 
North. The one proclaimed me to be the very author and ori- 
ginator of the Wilmot Proviso. The other reproached me as 
being a downright, or, at best, a disguised, enemy to that 



PERSONAL VINDICATION. 633 

proviso. The one exclaimed, as tiie very climax of his condem- 
nation, " I would sooner vote for Joshua R. Giddlngs himself 
than for Robert C. Winthrop." The other responded with an 
equally indignant emphasis, "and I would sooner vote for How- 
ell Cobb than for Robert C. Winthrop, — he cannot do worse, 
he may do better." Nay, I presume it is safe to say, that the 
honorable member is now of opinion that he has done better, 
since not only has the honorable member secured for himself 
a place on the Territorial Committee, but the report of the anti- 
slavery convention, at their late meeting in Boston, has remarked 
upon it as " a curious and instructive fact, that, in the composi- 
tion of committees, Mr. Cobb has given more weight to the anti- 
slavery element of the House than was done by his Northern 
predecessor." How far this is true, I leave others to pronounce. 

But the honorable members from Tennessee and Ohio, {par 
nohile fratrum !) have not been the only contributors to this 
most amiable, consistent, and harmonious testimony in regard to 
my public conduct and character. An honorable colleague from 
Massachusetts (Mr. Allen) has cast in his mite, also, both by 
prompting others at his elbow, and by the manlier method of 
direct accusation. He, too, has charged me with having arranged 
certain committees, with the deliberate purpose of preventing the 
action which northern men demanded. And more recently, 
again, an honorable member from Virginia, (Mr. Morton,) in a 
speech which, I take pleasure in saying, was characterized by 
entire courtesy, if not by entire justice, has told the House and 
his constituents that he voted against me as Speaker, because 
" he believed me to be in favor of the Wilmot Proviso ; because 
he believed me to be in favor of the abolition of slavery in the 
District of Columbia ; and because my name was fouiid in a 
minority of forty-five against the admission of Florida as a slave 
State." 

Sir, if my name were a little less humble than I feel it this 
day to be, — if 1 were not conscious how small a claim it has to 
be classed among the great names even of our own age and 
country, much more of the world, I should be tempted to con- 
sole myself under these conflicting accusations with those noble 
lines of Milton, which, as it is, I cannot but remember : — 



634 PERSONAL VINDICATION. 

"Fame, if not double foc'd, is double mouth'd, 
And with contrary blast proclaims most deeds ; 
On both his wings, one black, the other white, 
Bears greatest names in his wild adry flight.'' 

But indeed, ]Mr. Chairman, I need no consolation. These 
contradictory charges are the natural consequence of the very- 
position which I have sought to occupy, — of the very position 
which I glory this day in occupying, — and from which no pro- 
vocations and no reproaches can ever drive me. 

Sir, when I was first a candidate for Congress, now some ten 
winters gone, I told the Abolitionists of my district, in reply to 
their interrogatories, that, while I agreed with them in most 
of their abstract principles, and was ready to carry them out, 
in any jusf, practicable, and constitutional manner ; yet, if 
I were elected to this House, I should not regard it as any 
peculiar part of my duty to agitate the subject of slavery. I 
have adhered to that declaration. I have been no agitator. I 
have sympathized with no fanatics. I have defended the rights 
and interests and principles of the North, to the best of my 
ability, wherever and whenever I have found them assailed ; but 
I have enlisted in no crusade upon the institutions of the South. 
I have eschewed and abhorred ultraism at both ends of the 
Union. " A plague o' both your houses," has been my constant 
ejaculation ; and it is altogether natural, therefore, that both 
their houses should cry a plague on me ! I would not have it 
otherwise. I covet their opposition. I dote on their dislike. I 
desire no other testimony to the general propriety of my own 
course than their reproaches. I thank my God that he has 
endowed me, if with no other gifts, with a spirit of moderation, 
which incapacitates me for giving satisfaction to ultraists any- 
where and on any subject. If they were to speak well of me, I 
should be compelled to exclaim, like one of old, "What bad thing 
have I done, that such men praise me ? " 

The only thing which I have to regret, Mr. Chairman, is, that 
these various charges could not have been made against me in 
one and the same debate, and on one and the same day. They 
would then have effectually answered each other. They would 
then have fairly shamed each other out of court, and I should 



PERSONAL VINDICATION. 635 

have been spared the necessity of even this brief allusion to 
them. 

But, Sir, the list of my accusers is not yet complete. Another 
honorable member from Ohio, (Mr. Root,) has recently taken the 
field against me, and has seen fit to make, what, if it were 
entirely parliamentary, I should be constrained to call, some very 
impertinent allusions to my course in reference to a resolution of 
his, which was recently laid on the table. I was accidentally in 
the Senate chamber when his speech was delivered, but my 
attention has been called to it in a late number of the Congres- 
sional Globe. 

Sir, when the honorable member first offered his resolution, 
some weeks since, I united with my friends in the free States in 
saving it from the fate which it then merited, and which it has 
since received. I thought it then a most premature and precipi- 
tate movement, and there are thoSe near me who can bear wit- 
ness, that notwithstanding my exalted sense of the honorable 
member's habitual wisdom and prudence, I could not repress the 
exclamation — 

" Thus fools rush in, where angels fear to tread ! " 

I yielded, however, to the suggestions of those around me, 
that it might be as precipitate to lay it on the table at once, as it 
was to offer it ; and that there would be no harm in taking time 
to consider it. A fortnight intervened, and I did consider it in all 
its bearings. And as the honorable member has been so plain 
and unceremonious with me, in ascribing motives and calling 
names, I shall be equally plain and unceremonious with him, in 
telling him what I thought of his resolution. 

I regarded it, Mr. Chairman, considering all the circumstances, 
of Congress and of the country, as one of the most mischievous 
propositions ever introduced into this House. I regarded it as 
mischievous in its inevitable consequences, and as mischievous 
in its deliberate design. I came to the conclusion that the 
honorable member, for the sake of a little miserable notoriety, 
had wantonly put in peril the very cause of which he professed 
to be the peculiar champion, — that for the sake of playing cap- 
tain, and marching ahead of the music, he had been willing to 



636 PERSONAL VINDICATION. 

take the risk of sacrificing the very fortress of which he assumed 
to be the defender. I believed, in one word Sir, that if that 
resolution were persevered in, in the existing condition of this 
House and of the country, all hope of practical legislation would 
be extinguished, the great measure of the admission of Califor- 
nia, as a State, into this Union, would be impeded, obstructed, 
and finally defeated ; and that the session would be one pro- 
tracted scene of strife, confusion, and discord. 

And why, then. Sir, entertaining these views of the resolution, 
did I not vote upon the second motion to lay it on the table ? 
For this is the part of my conduct which the honorable member 
has taken in such especial dudgeon, and which he has made the 
pretext for applying to me certain contumelious epithets. 

Well, now, I do confess, Mr. Chairman, that I was a little 
malicious in withholding my vote on this particular occasion. 
It would have been so very gratifying to the honorable member 
if he could have only had me once fairly on the record, where he 
has never yet had me, against a resolution containing as one of 
its elements, the Wilmot proviso I It would have furnished such 
an excellent apology for him and his friends for having voted 
against me as Speaker, and for having thrown the organization 
of this House into the hands of a Southern Democrat I It 
would have been such a telling free-soil card in the next canvass 
in the fourth district of Massachusetts, to say nothing of the 
twenty-first district, I think it is, of Ohio ! Indeed, Sir, it was 
certainly a little cruel to deprive the honorable member of an 
advantage upon which he had so confidently calculated. 

But I believe it is Solomon who has said, " Surely in vain is 
the net spread in the sight of any bird." Sir, I saw the trap 
which the honorable member had laid for me. I knew that he 
and his peculiar friends were lying in wait for me. I knew they 
were seeking to find a justification, after the event, for an oppo- 
sition to me for which they had so little apology beforehand. 
I saw that he had framed his resolution so that, whether we voted 
for it or against it, we should be placed in a false position. If 
we voted not to lay it on the table, and seemingly sustained the 
resolution, we were to be held up as abandoning General Taylor 
and the Administration. If we voted to lay it on the table, we 



PERSONAL VINDICATION. 637 

were to be denounced as enemies to the principles of the ordi- 
nance of '87. I understand that the honorable member said, in 
advance, that he would either have our votes or our scalps. I 
know not the precise meaning which is to be attached to this 
humane and elegant expression, if he really used it. It might 
be well, perhaps, to refer it for inquiry to the committee on Indian 
Affairs. If he only intended, by this tomahawk threat, that he 
would deal a few stabs at my character behind my back, he is 
welcome to all the glory of the exploit. But whatever he meant, 
I did not intend that he should have either my vote or my scalp, 
if I could help it; and seeing that my vote would make no 
difference to the result, I declined to gratify his desire to insnare 
me. And now, because the trap of the honorable member failed 
to work, in the only case in which it was of special importance 
for him that it should work, he flies into a passion, strips off his 
neck-cloth, and begins to scold about dodging and skulking ! 

Why, Sir, the honorable gentleman forgets himself. Certainly 
his speech forgets itself; for, in the very same paragraph in which 
he upbraids me for my course in this case, he describes his own 
course in another case, as entirely identical with it. I would 
not ask a better justification from any one, than that which the 
honorable member himself has furnished me out of his own 
mouth. Hear what he says. Sir, as to his own conduct at the 
late Presidential election, — 

" It was nothing more (says he) but a game at the best. I 
neither wanted to cheat nor to be cheated, and hence I took no 
part in it. I stood out." 

Does it not lie admirably in his mouth, to charge others with 
skulking, and to exclaim so heroically, " it is better to vote wrong 
than to dodge," when, in the very same breath, he is boasting 
that he skulked himself from the great Presidential struggle ! 

Nor is this the only instance of the same sort in the honorable 
member's history. What else but dodging was his conduct in 
the protracted contest for the Speakership ? What did he do 
but throw away his vote to the end on an impossible candidate? 
What did the eight peculiar free soilers do, but pair ofi', four from 
each party, and, by neutralizing each other, virtually not vote at 
all — virtually dodge, by refusing to vote so as to make any 

54 



638 PERSONAL VIXDICATION. 

difference to the result ? Sir, there are those here who believe, 
that the first great desertion of Northern principles at this session 
has been exhibited by those, who have thrown the organization 
of this House into the hands of a Southern Democrat. Of that 
the honorable member stands convicted. And, my opinion is, 
that any one who considers the adroit and ingenious manner in 
which it was done, by seeming to vote, and yet practically not 
votino- at all, — will come to the conclusion, that if the honorable 
member desires to see the true " Artful Dodger " of the day, he 
must look at home. 

Nor is this all, Mr. Chairman. The honorable member has 
made a great vaunting of what he would have done on the last 
night of the last session, if the Walker amendment had been 
longer persisted in. The more important inquiry. Sir, is, what 
did he do ? Where was he during the weary watches of that 
memorable night? Where was he when the honorable member 
from Tennessee (Mr. Andrew Johnson) moved to strike out the 
word " impartial" from the vote of thanks to the Chair ? Who 
then was " willing to wound, but yet afraid to strike ? " Where 
was he, too, when the honorable member from Kentucky (Mr. 
Morehead) moved that most momentous amendment to the 
Walker proviso in regard to the rightful boundaries of Texas ? 
His name is not on the record ; and, though the proverb is some- 
what musty. Sir, I cannot help reminding the honorable member 
that " those who live in glass houses should not throw stones." 

But he tells us most pathetically, that the Wilmot proviso has 
been wounded in the house of its friends ; nay, that so far as 
this House could kill it, it has been killed. Well, now, Sir, this 
remains to be seen. Doubtless, the honorable member finds it 
for his purpose, at this moment, to think so, or at least to say so. 
But it remains to be seen whether the great principles of the 
ordinance of '87 have lost any portion of their vitality ; whether 
they have not as strong and living a hold on the hearts of other 
northern and western men as on that of the honorable member 
himself; and whether, on. the proper occasion, if a real necessity 
or a reasonable demand for their assertion and maintenance 
should arise, they would not be asserted and maintained by 
as large a majority in this body as they ever have been hereto- 
fore. I believe they would be. 



PERSONAL VINDICATION. 639 

But this I do say, — that if these principles have been wounded 
and struck down ; if it be true, that, by laying on the table an 
unseasonable resolution of the honorable member from Ohio, 
we have killed the Wilmot proviso, — its death must lie forever 
at his door, and not at ours ; and the true inscription on its tomb- 
stone will read thus : " Here lies a victim to the restless vanity 
and headstrong rashness of the honorable member from Ohio, 
who held it deliberately up to receive its death-blow, in order to 
gratify his passion for notoriety, and his pique against some of 
his old friends of the Whig party." 

Why, Sir, the conduct of the honorable member on this occa- 
sion was what a French philosopher has called " worse than a 
fault." It was a mistake — a fatal blunder. It was a momicnt 
of all others when the North should not have been called on to 
show its hand ; when gentlemen from the free States should not 
have been required to say what they would do, or what they 
would not do, in regard to the Territories ; and my only regret is, 
that the resolution could not have been suffered to go upon the 
table by southern votes only, with the mere silent assent of 
northern men. It was the precise case for what the honorable 
member has called " standing out," and for the reservation of all 
expression of opinion or intention, until a real exigency for such 
an expression had occurred. And I repeat, Sir, that if the north- 
ern force has been weakened, and the northern front broken, it is 
owing to the rash and precipitate charge which was attempted 
under the assumed and illegitimate lead of the honorable mem- 
ber from Ohio. 

But there are some men, we are told, who are " wiser in their 
own conceit than seven men who can render a reason." The 
honorable member and his little squad, insist upon regarding 
themselves as the only persons in the country, or, certainly, as 
the only persons in this House, who know how to defend north- 
ern rights, or how to vindicate the great principles of human 
freedom. Nay, Sir, they modestly claim to be the only ones 
who desire, or who are even wiUing, to defend or vindicate them. 
All the world are doughfaces (as they elegantly style it) except 
themselves I They alone are loyal to human liberty! They are 
the only reliable defenders, or legitimate occupants, of the great 



640 PERSONAL VINDICATIOX. 

free-soil field I Surely these are the men, and wisdom shall die 
with them I 

I cannot listen, Mr. Chairman, to these arrogant assumptions 
and offensive pretensions, without calling to my aid the castiga- 
tion which was administered by Edmund Burke, (not the Editor 
of the Dailij Union, Sir,) to one of the petty cabals which 
infested Great Britain during the period of the French revolu- 
tion, and which were attempting, as he said, " to hide their total 
want of consequence in bustle and noise, and pufRng, and mu- 
tual quotation of each other." "Because half a dozen grass- 
hoppers, (said he,) under a fern, make the field ring with their 
importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle, reposed 
beneath the shadow of the British Oak, chew the cud and are 
silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are 
the only inhabitants of the field; that, of course, they are many 
in number; or that, after all, they are other than the little, 
shrivelled, meagre, hopping, though loud and troublesome, insects 
of the hour." 

For one, Sir, I do not recognize the honorable member and 
his half a dozen compeers on this floor, as my file-leaders, or as 
my fuglemen, in this campaign. I do not belong to the " Root 
and branch party." I shall not march at the tap of their drum. 
I shall not vote against any bona fide, practical, and seasonable 
measure, simply because they originate it ; but I give my consti- 
tuents and the country notice, once for all, that they are not to 
judge of my sentiments upon the great questions of the day by 
any votes which I may give, or which I may not give, upon their 
amateur abstractions or their precipitate instructions. I shall 
vote for them, or vote against them, or not vote at all, just as it 
happens to suit my own views, and certainly not at all with a 
view to suit their purposes. 

The honorable member, in the course of a speech in which he 
has misre])resented and assailed at least one half of the northern 
members of this House, has told us that he was a member of 
"the reviled Free Soil sect." Good heavens, Sir! if they are 
the reviled, who are the revilers, and what must they be ? Never, 
in the whole history of our country — never, since the existence 
of political parties anywhere — has there been a party, which, 



TERSONAL VINDICATION. 641 

under the pretext of philanthropy, has so revelled and luxuriated 
in malice, hatred, and uncharitableness — in vituperation, ca- 
lumny, and slander — as this " reviled Free Soil sect." I speak of 
their principal leaders and organs, as I know them in my own part 
of the country, and not of the great mass of their followers, there 
or elsewhere, who, I doubt not, are led along by honest impulses, 
and many of whom, I as little doubt, are disgusted with the 
music of their own trumpeters. Never, Sir, I repeat, has there 
been witnessed in this country, or on the face of the globe, such 
an audacity of false statement and false accusation, as that with 
which some of their presses have teemed ! Never have there 
been baser stabs at character than those with which some of 
their speeches have reeked ! 

I need not say that I have had my full share, and more than 
my full share, of their misrepresentation and abuse. I bear no 
special malice towards members of this House who deal with 
me in this style, because I know that, after all, they are but the 
instruments and mouth-pieces of others afar off. There is a 
little nest of vipers. Sir, in my own immediate district and its 
vicinity, who have been biting a file for some three or four years 
past, and who, having fairly used up their own teeth, have evi- 
dently enlisted in their service the fresher fangs of some honor- 
able members of this House.* '■'•Odisse quern IcBclerisP Con- 
scious that they have wronged me, they now hate me; and 
having been thoroughly put down at home, they have turned 
prompters and panderers to assaults upon me here. Let them 
go on in their manly and magnanimous vocation. If they only 
succeed in doing themselves half as much injury as they do me 
good, they will speedily merit as much of my sympathy as they 
now have of my scorn. 

Sir, I have already had occasion, during the present session, 
to allude to one of the false statements which has been fre- 

* Tor this application of the old fable of The Viper and the File, as well as for some 
of the other sharpnesses and severities of this speech, (which is given here precisely 
as it was delivered and published at the time.) the plea of the old Roman Fabulist 
may be employed : — 

" Excedit animus quem proposuit terminum : 
Sed difficultcr continetur spiritus, 
Integritatis qui sincera; conscius 
A noxiorum premitur insolentiis." 

54* 



642 PERSONAL VINDICATION. 

quently made in regard to me at home, and which has been 
repeated here by the honorable member from Ohio on my right, 
(Mv. Giddings.) That honorable member's speech, I take occa- 
sion to say, as printed for the use of the fourth district in Massa- 
chusetts, is a mere tissue of perversion and misrepresentation, 
so far as my conduct is concerned. But the most that I can do, 
on this occasion, is to notice one of the charges which it con- 
tained, and in regard to which, it will be remembered, a direct 
issue was made up between us. 

The honorable member seems to have thought it important to 
his justification among his constituents for his vote against me 
for Speaker two years ago, that he should implicate me in the 
origin of the late deplorable war with Mexico. He knew per- 
fectly well that my mere vote for the bill, by which the existence 
of that war was recognized, and by which provision was made 
for the rescue of our little army on the Rio Grande, would not 
answer his purpose. He knew that, whether that vote were right 
or wrong, it was given in company with those who were alto- 
gether invulnerable to his malignant shafts. He knew that he 
could not strike at me, on this point, without striking also at 
Corwin, and Vinton, and Schenck, of his own State, and Marsh 
and Foote, of Vermont, and I know not how many others, from 
the North and from the West, whose characters would be an 
ample shield against all who should attack them, and whom he 
would not, then at least, have dared to charge as supporters of 
the war. And so. Sir, he sets himself to work to prove me an 
accessory before the fact, and charges me with having gone to a 
Whig caucus, before the war bill was introduced, and with hav- 
ing made an appeal to the Whigs, to vote in favor of a bill, in 
regard to the intended character of which I had no more know- 
ledge than the man in the moon ! Sir, I never heard of this 
Wliig caucus, to the best of my knowledge and belief, until I 
saw this account of it in a letter of the honorable member to 
his constituents, eighteen months afterwards. And difficult as 
it almost always is for any one to prove a negative, it is for- 
tunately in my power, this day, to furnish such conclusive testi- 
mony that I attended no such meeting, and made no such speech, 
that even the honorable member himself will blush at ever having 
made the statement. 



PERSONAL VINDICATION. 643 

I have here a budget of letters, which I have rescued within 
a few days past from a forgotten pigeon-hole at home. They 
were procured two years ago, without my instigation, and almost 
without my knowledge, by the editor of the Boston Atlas, with 
a view to vindicate me from this calumny at the time it was 
originally uttered. I shall append some of them, if not all of 
them, to the pamphlet copy of this speech, if such a copy is ever 
published. I shall only have time to read one of them now. 

Is the honorable member from Delaware in his seat? (Mr. 
Houston rose and assented.) I have here a letter bearing his 
signature, dated Washington, April 1st, 1848, and addressed to 
William Schouler, Esq., Boston. I will thank him to tell me, 
after I have read it, whether it is his letter, and whether this be 
his testimony now, as it was two years ago, in relation to the 
allegation of the honorable member from Ohio. 

The letter is as follows : 

Washington, April 1st, 1848. 

Dear Sir : I have received your letter of the 30th ultimo, and in reply to it I have 
to state, that I remember very well the casual conversation which I had witli you re- 
cently in Boston, " concerning a meeting of Whig members of Congress, held on the 
morning of the 11th of May, 1846," and I will briefly state, at your request, what I 
recollect in relation to the absence of the Honorable Eobert C Winthrop on that 
occasion. 

That meeting was held in consequence of the hostile collision which had just occurred 
on the Rio Grande, between a portion of our military forces and those of Mexico, and 
I perfectly recollect that I not only attended the meeting, but that I also made some 
remarks in it, the substance of which I still remember. The meeting was not full, 
many members of the House belonging to the Whig party being absent, and I distinctly 
recollect that the meeting adjourned without coming to any formal conclusion on the 
subject, in consequence of this fact, as was then mentioned and understood by those 
present. I remember that Mr. Smith of Connecticut, Mr. Hudson of Massachusetts, 
and Mr. Giddings of Ohio, were present at the meeting, and appeared to me to be 
among the most prominent of the speakers in it ; and I also remember that I had a 
few words of convei-sation with them after the meeting was over, and before we sepa- 
rated, upon the subject of some remarks which I had made in the meeting. I have a 
very distinct recollection that Mr. Winthrop was not present at the meeting, and of 
noting his absence, as well as that of Mr. Vinton of Ohio : and my reason, if any should 
be required to fortify my memory on this point, for observing this fiict, is this : I had 
already come to regard these two gentlemen as among the most experienced and pro- 
minent members of our party in the House ; and as one sat directly before me, and the 
other immediately on my right, during that session, in the House, it will not appear 
strange, I apprehend, when these two circumstances are taken together, that I should 
not only note but remember their absence on that occasion. Such is my distinct recol- 
lection, and without wishing to raise any question of memory between myself and 



644 PERSONAL VINDICATION. 

others on this or any other point, I have no hesitation in giving it to you in compli- 
ance with your request. 

As to the meeting held some time previous, on the '• Oregon question," as it is fa- 
miliarly termed, I have to state, that it is impossible that I could have confounded it in 
my memory with the meeting first mentioned, as I did not attend that meeting, and 
knew nothing of its existence until a day or two after it had been held. 
I am, very traly and respectfully, yom- obedient servant, 

John W. Houston. 
Wm. Schouler, Esq. 

Mr. Houston. That is my letter, and I have no alteration to 
make in it. 

Mr. Winthrop. There are other letters here, Sir, equally 
distinct and conclusive. 

But the honorable member summons Mr. E. D. Culver, of 
New York, a late member of this House, to his aid', and insists 
that Mr. Culver has substantiated his charge. Sir, I think it is 
in Sheridan's play of the Rivals, that one of the characters is 
made to say — " Whenever I draw on my invention for a good 
current lie, I always forge indorsements as well as the bill." 
Now, I do not intend to apply the offensive part of this lan- 
guage to the honorable member. I disclaim doing so. Still 
less do I intend any reflection upon Mr. Culver. But I say that 
the letter of Mr. Culver does little or nothing to sustain the 
honorable member's accusation, and that he must procure 
stronger indorsements, if he expects his bill to pass current. 

What says the Honorable E. D. ■ Culver, in the letter upon 
which the honorable member relies ? 

"In reply to your note of the 14th, (says he.) which came to hand last evening, I 
would state that I was at the Whig caucus, in the northeast corner of the Capitol, on 
the morning of the 11 th of May, 1846. The subject of our deliberations was the anti- 
cipated War bill. I think Mr. Winthrop, Mr. Vinton, Mr. Hunt, and yourself, and 
others were present and spoke. The precise sentiments advanced by Mr. Winthrop I 
cannot call to mind ; but the purport,_ the general scope of liis remarks, was, that we 
(the Whigs) must not oppose the measure ; that policy would require us to support it. 
I do not recollect his allusion to the Federalists and the war of 1812.'' (It seems that 
this impartial cross-examiner had asked some leading questions.) " I think Mr. Vin- 
ton took a similar view. Yours was quite the reverse." 

Now, Sir, in answer to these thinkings and indistinct remem- 
brances of what Mr. Winthrop said, and what Mr. Vinton said, 
and what Mr. Hunt said, 1 have here a letter from Mr. Vinton, 
to say that he never attended that meeting, and here, within 



PERSONAL VINDICATION. 645 

three feet of me, is Mr. Vinton himself, to acknowledge the let- 
ter, and to repeat the assertion ! While here, again, is another 
letter from the honorable Washington Hunt, to say that he was 
absent from Washington on the morning on which the meet- 
ing was held, and did not return until the following day! 

Mr. Chairman, the most charitable explanation that can be 
given of this extraordinary and unfounded allegation, which the 
honorable member from Ohio has so perseveringly brought 
against me, is that suggested in the letter of my late colleague 
and friend, Mr. Hudson, who gives it as his opinion, that the 
honorable member may have confounded this meeting with one 
which was held in regard to the Oregon notice resolution, when 
he was the open advocate of measures that looked to war, and 
I declared myself in favor of measures for the maintenance of 
peace ! 

But I leave the honorable member and his friends to find 
explanations for themselves. It is enough for me to pronounce 
the charge to be false, and to prove it to be so. Having done 
this, I now hold it up to the House and to the country, as a fair 
sample of the charges which have been arrayed against me from 
the same quarter. Ex uno, disce omnes. 

Sir, I have done with these personalities. They have not been 
of my seeking. They are unnatural and revolting to my dispo- 
sition. I am entirely new to this style of debate. During a ten 
years' occupancy of a seat in this House, I have never before 
had occasion to resort to it. I trust that I may never have 
another such occasion. But I could no longer submit in silence 
to such gross and groundless aspersions. Gentlemen may vote 
against me whenever they please. There is no office in the gift 
of the House, of the people, or of the President, which I covet, 
or for which I would quarrel with any one for not giving me his 
support. But no man shall slander me with impunity. No man 
shall pervert and misrepresent my words and acts, and falsify the 
record of my public career, without exposure. 

That career has been one of humble pretension, and presents 
no claim of distinguished service of any sort. But such as it is, 
I am willing that it should be investigated. Examine the 
record. There may be votes upon it which require explanation ; 



646 PERSONAL VINDICATION. 

votes about which honest men may differ; votes as to which I 
myself may have doubted at the time, and may still doubt. But 
examine the record fairly and candidly ; nothing extenuate, nor 
set down aught in malice ; and you will find that I have neither 
been false to the North nor to the South, to the East nor to the 
"West. You will find that, while I have been true to my con- 
stituents, I have been true, also, to the Constitution and to the 
Union. This, at least, I know, Sir — my conscience this day 
bearing me witness — that I have been true to myself, to my 
own honest judgment, to my own clear convictions of right, of 
duty, and of patriotism. And we all remember how justly, as 
well as how nobly, it has been said : — 

" This above all, — to thine own self be tnie ; 
And it must follow, as the night the clay, 
Thou canst not then be fiilse to any man." 

And now, Mr. Chairman, I would gladly turn to some serious 
consideration of the great questions of the day, but I am admo- 
nished that my hour is almost exhausted, and I must reserve what 
I had proposed to say on these topics for another, and I trust an 
early opportunity. Having once swept this offensive rubbish of 
personalities out of my path, I shall no longer be obstructed in 
dealing with the weightier matters which are before us. I can- 
not conclude, however, on this occasion, without a few distinct 
declarations. 

In the first place. Sir, I have no hesitation in saying, that the 
admission of California into the Union as a State, under the 
constitution which she has herself adopted, is, in my judgment, 
the first and greatest measure to be accomplished at the present 
session of Congress. For that I am ready ; and I shall bring to 
it whatever powers I possess. 

In the second place. Sir, I do not believe that slavery does 
now exist, or can ever exist, in any of the Territories recently 
acquired from Mexico, without the positive sanction of law. 
And such a sanction, I, for one, shall never aid in giving. 

In the third place. Sir, while I reserve to myself the full 
liberty to act and to vote upon every question which may here- 
after arise, as my judgment at the time, and under the circum- 
stances, may dictate ; I have no hesitation in expressing my 



PERSONAL VINDICATION. 647 

opinion, that the plan proposed by the President of the United 
States is the plan to which we must come at last, for the settle- 
ment of these exciting and dillicult questions. I do not say that 
it is the plan of all others which some of us could have wished 
to carry out. But the question is not what we wish, but what 
can we accomplish. " If to do, were as easy as to know what 
it were good to do, chapels had been churches, and poor men's 
cottages rich men's palaces." We must aim at something prac- 
tical and practicable. The President has done so ; and, by 
following out his suggestions, I believe southern sensibilities 
may be allayed, northern principles satisfactorily vindicated, 
domestic peace maintained, and the American Union preserved. 

And, Mr. Chairman, the American Union must be preserved. 
I speak for Faneuil Hall. Not for Faneuil Hall, occupied, as it 
sometimes has been, by an Anti-slavery or a Liberty party con- 
vention, denouncing the Constitution and Government under 
which we live, and breathing threatenings and slaughter against 
all who support them ; but for Faneuil Hall, thronged as it has 
been so often in times past, and as it will be so often for a 
thousand generations in times to come, by as intelligent, honest, 
and patriotic a people as the sun ever shone upon ; I speak for 
Faneuil Hall, and for the great masses of true-hearted American 
freemen, without distinction of party, who delight to dwell 
beneath its shadow, and to gather beneath its roof; I speak for 
Faneuil Hall, when I say, " the Union of these States must not, 
shall not, be dissolved I " 

The honorable member from Ohio, (Mr. Giddings) alluded, 
the other day, in terms of reproach and condemnation, to a sen- 
timent which I proposed at a public dinner, in this same Faneuil 
Hall, on the 4th of .July, 1845. I am willing that the House and 
the country should pass judgment upon that sentiment. I am 
sorry that it is not better ; but, such as it is, I reiterate it here 
to-day. I stand by it now and always. It is my living senti- 
ment, and will be my dying sentiment : — 

" Our Country — Whether bounded by the St. John's and 
the Sabine, or however otherwise bounded or described, and be 
the measurements more or less; — still our country, to be 
cherished in all our hearts, — to be defended by all our hands I " 



NOTE. 



LETTER mOM THE HON. SAMUEL F. VIXTOX. 

Washixgtox CITY, Aiiril G, 1848, 
Wm. Schouler, Esq., 

Dear Sir : I am in receipt of your note, requesting me to state whether 
there was a meeting of the "Whig members of the House of Representatives on 
the morning of the day when the war with Mexico was declared ? Whether 
Mr. Winthrop was there, and made a speech urging the whole Whig party to 
vote for the war ; and whether I was there, and made a speech to the same 
pui'port ? 

I have no recollection of having been present at that meeting — and if I ever 
knew that such a meeting was held, the recollection of it has wholly faded 
away from my memory. 

I am, very respectfully, your obedient servant, 

Samuel F. Vixtox. 



LETTER FROM THE HOX. "W. HUXT. 

Washixgtox, April 1, 1848. 
Dear Sir : I have received your letter of the 30th ult., with a copy of the 
Boston Atlas of 23d March. 

The only answer I can make to your incj^uiries is to inform you that I was not 
in this city on the eleventh day of May, 1846. I left the Capital late in April, 
to visit my residence in New York, and did not return till the 12th of May, the 
day after the AVar bill passed the House. 

Mr. Culver is mistaken in his impression that I was present at any meeting 
held on the day to which he refers. 

Very respectfully yours, 

W. HuxT. 
Wm. Schouler, Esq., Editor of the Atlas, Boston. 



EXTRACT OK A LETTER FROM HOX. CHARLES HUDSOX. 

Washixgtox, April 1, 1848. 
Sir : In relation to the meeting of the Whigs on the morning of the 11th, 



NOTE. G49 

(May,) I will say to you, as I have said to Mr. Giddiiigs in a full conversation with 
him on the suljject, that I am satisfied that he conlbunds that mooting with anotiier 
which took place at another time and place, on another subject. The news of 
the conflict between our forces and those of Mexico came into this city on Satur- 
day evening after the adjourimient of the House. On Sunday eveiiin"- some 
gentlemen told me that it was thought desirable that the "Whigs should have a 
meeting in the morning before the session of the House, as it was expected that 
the President would send in a war message. I went to the committee-room in 
the morning, and found not more than half a dozen there ; we waited till near 
the hour of the mooting of the House before we called to order. The members 
came in slowly, not more than twenty or twenty-five being present at last. I 
think Mr. Winthrop was not present. But I am perfectly confident that he did 
not make a speech urging the Whigs to vote for any war measure. I had stron" 
convictions against the propriety of any such measure, and if one of my own 
colleagues had made such a speech as has been imputed to Mr. Winthrop, I am 
satisfied that I could not have forgotten it. Besides, boarding as I did with 
Messrs. Delano, Culver, Root, and King, all of whom voted as I did against the 
bill, the vote of Mr. Winthrop was a subject of very frequent and very free 
remark, and yet I never heard any allusion to such a speech, nor, indeed, to any 
speech of Mr. Winthrop made in caucus on the morning of the 11th May dur- 
ing that or the following session — the first intimation of such a speech comino- 
to my knowledge since Mr. Winthrop was chosen Speaker. My impressions on 
this Avhole subject are the more distinct, because those who voted against the 
war wei-e immediately assailed, and on the 14th of the same month I made a 
speech against the war, and in justification of my vote. 

The Whig meeting on the morning of the 11th of May was in the room of 
the Committee on Foreign Affairs ; but the meeting Avhich I think Mr. Gid- 
dings confounds with this was held in the evening in the committee room on 
Public Lands, in another part of the Capitol. At the last named meetino- Mr. 
Winthrop, Mr. Vinton, Mr. Giddings, and, I think, Mr. Hunt, spoke ; but this 
meeting was some time in the winter, and the subject was the Oregon notice 
which had been recommended by the President in his message. In conversation 
with Mr. Giddings this winter, we both recollected this meeting so well as to be 
able to point out to each other the position in the room where the speakers 
respectively stood when they addressed the meeting, and agreed as to the 
speakers, but differed in our recollections as to the subject under consideration. 
At this Oregon meeting there was a marked difference of oijinion between Mr. 
W^inthrop and Mr. Giddings, and some little warmth was manifested in the 
debate — Mr. Winthrop being opposed to giving the notice, and Mr. GidcUno-s 
taking the opposite view of the question, according to my recollection. 
I am, respectfully, your obedient servant, 

Charles Hudson. 
Col. William Schouler, Editor of the Atlas. 

55 



650 NOTE. 



EXTRACT OF A LETTER FROM HON. J. GRIXNELL. 

Washington, April 1, 1848. 
I have to state tliat I have no recollection of any meeting of the Whigs on 
the morning of the 11th of May, 1846. I never heard of any until the present 
session of this Congress. I do not believe that Mr. Winthrop attended any such 
nieetin"-, for the reason that I am under a strong impression — I may say, that I 
have as clear a recollection of the fact as of almost any that occurred on that 
memorable day — that INIr. Winthrop did not leave INIrs. AVhitwell's that mom- 
m<^ until we left together, near the hour of the meeting of the House, and that 
we went to the House together, and it was called to order about the time we 
entered. I may add, there was a very free and full discussion of our votes on 
this bill for some weeks after, at Mrs. AMiitwell's, and that I never heard of ]\Ir. 
Winthrop's attending any caucus of the Whigs on the day war was declared, or 
making a speech urging the Whigs to go for the war. 



THE DEATH OF JOHN C. CALHOUN. 



A SPEECH DELIVERED IN THE HOUSE OF KEPRESENTATIVES OF THE 
UNITED STATES, ON THE ANNOUNCEMENT OP MR. CALHOUN'S DEATH, 
APRIL 1, 1850. 



I AM not unaware, Mr. Speaker, that the voice of New England 
has already been heard to-day, in its most authentic and most 
impressive tones, in the other wing of the Capitol. But it has 
been suggested to me, and the suggestion has met with the 
promptest assent from my own heart, that here, also, that voice 
should not be altogether mute on this occasion. 

The distinguished person, whose death has been announced 
to us in the resolutions of the Senate, belongs not, indeed, to us. 
It is not ours to pronounce his eulogy. It is not ours, certainly, 
to appropriate his fame. But it is ours, to bear witness to his 
character, to do justice to his virtue, to unite in paying honor to 
his memory, and to offer our heartfelt sympathies, as I now 
do, to those who have been called to sustain so great a bereave- 
ment. 

We have been told, Sir, by more than one adventurous navi- 
gator, that it was worth all the privations and perils of a pro- 
tracted voyage beyond the line, to obtain even a passing view of 
the Southern Cross, — that great constellation of the Southern 
hemisphere. We can imagine, then, what would be the emo- 
tions of those who have always enjoyed the light of that magni- 
ficent luminary, and who have taken their daily and their nightly 
direction from its refulgent rays, if it were suddenly blotted out 
from the sky. 

Such, Sir, and so deep, I can conceive to be the emotions at 



652 THE DEATH OF JOHN C. CALHOUN. 

this hour, of not a few of the honored friends and associates 
whom I see around me. 

Indeed, no one who has been ever so distant an observer of 
the course of public affairs for a quarter of a century past, can 
fail to realize, that a star of the first magnitude has been struck 
from our political firmament. Let us hope, Sir, that it has only 
been transferred to a higher and purer sphere, where it may shine 
on with undimmed brilliancy forever! 

Mr. Speaker, it is for others to enter into the details of Mr. 
Calhoun's life and services. It is for others to illustrate and to^ 
vindicate his peculiar opinions and principles. It is for me to 
speak of him only as he was known to the country at large, and 
to all, without distinction of party, who have represented the 
country, of late years, in either branch of the National Councils. 

And speaking of him thus, Sir, I cannot hesitate to say, that, 
among what may be called the second generation of American 
statesmen since the adoption of the Federal Constitution, there 
has been no man of a more marked character, of more pro- 
nounced qualities, or of a wider and more deserved distinction. 

The mere length and variety of his public services, in almost 
every branch of the National Government, running through a 
continuous period of almost forty years, — as a member of this 
House, as Secretary of War, as Vice-President of the United 
States, as Secretary of State, and as a Senator from his own 
adored and adoring South Carolina, — would alone have secured 
him a conspicuous and permanent place upon our public records. 

But he has left better titles to remembrance than any which 
mere office can bestow. 

There was an unsullied purity in his private life ; there was an 
inflexible integrity in his public conduct ; there was an indescrib- 
able fascination in his familiar conversation ; there was a 
condensed energy in his formal discourse ; there was a quick- 
ness of perception, a vigor of deduction, a directness and a de- 
votedness of purpose, in all that he said, or wrote, or did ; there 
was a Roman dignity in his whole Senatorial deportment; which, 
together, made up a character, which cannot fail to be contem- 
plated and admired to the latest posterity. 

I have said. Sir, that New England can appropriate no part 



THE DEATH OF JOHN C. CALHOUN. 653 

of his fame. But we may be permitted to remember, that it 
was in our schools of learning and of law that he was trained 
up for the great contests which awaited him in the forum or the 
Senate chamber. Nor can we forget how long and how inti- 
mately he was associated, in the Executive or Legislative 
branches of the Government, with more than one of our own 
most cherished statesmen. 

The loss of such a man, Sir, creates a sensible gap in the 
public councils. To the State which he represented, and the 
section of country with which he was so peculiarly identified, 
no stranger tongue may venture to attempt words of adequate 
consolation. But let us hope that the event may not be without 
a wholesome and healing influence upon the troubles of the 
times. Let us heed the voice, which comes to us all, both as 
individuals and as public officers, in so solemn and signal a pro- 
vidence of God. Let us remember, that, whatever happens to 
the Republic, we must die I Let us reflect how vain are the 
personal strifes and partisan contests in which we daily engage, 
in view of the great account which we may so soon be called 
on to render ! Well may we exclaim, as Cicero exclaimed, in 
considering the death of Crassus : " O fallacem hominum spem^ 
frag-ilemque fortimam, et manes nostras contentiones ! " 

Finally, Sir, let us find fresh bonds of brotherhood and of union 
in the cherished memories of those who have gone before us ; 
and let us resolve that, so far as in us lies, the day shall never 
come, when New England men may not speak of the great 
names of the South, whether among the dead or the living, as 
of Americans and fellow-countrymen I 



55* 



THE 

ADMISSION OF CALIFORNIA, 



AND THE 



ADJUSTMENT OF THE SLAVERY QUESTION. 



A SPEECH DELIVERED IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES OF THE 
UNITED STATES, IN COMMITTEE OP THE WHOLE ON THE STATE OF 
THE UNION, MAY 8, 1850. 



When I had the honor of addressing the Committee of the 
Whole on the State of the Union some weeks ago, I intimated 
my pm'pose to take another opportunity, at no distant day, to 
express, somewhat more in detail than I was able to do on that 
occasion, the views which I entertain in regard to what have 
well been called the great questions of the day. 

The eager competitions for the floor, which have been wit- 
nessed here almost without intermission from that time to this, 
have postponed the accomplishment of this purpose much longer 
than 1 could have desired. 

I rise now, however, at last, to fulfil it. And most heartily do I 
wish, Mr. Chairman, that, in doing so, I could see my way clear 
to contribute something to the repose of the country, and to the 
harmony of our national councils. I yield to no one in the sin- 
cerity or the earnestness of my desire, that every bone of conten- 
tion between different portions of the Union may be broken, 
every root of bitterness removed, and that the American Con- 
gress may be seen again in a condition to discharge its 



THE ADMISSION OF CALIFORNIA. 655 

legitimate functions, of providing at once for the wants of the 
Government and for the interests of the people. If there be an 
example in history, which I would gladly emulate at such a 
moment as this, it is that of an old Swiss patriot, four hundred 
years ago — of whom I have recently read an account — who, 
when the confederated cantons had become so embittered 
against each other, by a long succession of mutual criminations 
and local feuds, that the dissolution of the confederacy was 
openly proposed and discussed, and the liberties of Switzerland 
seemed on the very verge of ruin, was suddenly found rushing 
from his cherished retirement into the Assembly of Deputies, 
and exclaiming, " Concord, concord, concord I" and who, it 
is related, by his prudence, his patriotism, and his eloquence, 
brought back that Assembly, and the people whom they repre- 
sented, to a sense of the inestimable blessings which were at 
stake upon the issue, and finally succeeded in restoring his dis- 
tracted country to a condition of harmony, tranquillity, and 
assured Union ! 

Sir, there is no sacrifice of personal opinion, of pride of con- 
sistency, of local regard, of official position, of present havings 
or of future hopes, which I would not willingly make to play 
such a part as this. 

Perhaps it may be said, that it has been played already. Per- 
haps it may be said, that a voice, or voices, have already been 
heard in the other end of this Capitol, if not in this, which have 
stilled the angry storm of fraternal discord, and given us the 
grateful assurance that all our controversies shall be peacefully 
settled. 

At any rate, Sir, whether this be so or not, I am but too sen- 
sible that it is not given to me, in this hour, to attempt such a 
character. And let me add, that there is one sacrifice which I 
could never make, even for all the glory which might result from 
the successful performance of so exalted a service. I mean, the 
sacrifice of my own deliberately adopted and honestly cherished 
principles. These I must avow, to-day and always. These I 
must stand to, here and everywhere. Under all circumstances, 
in all events, I must follow the lead of my own conscientious 
convictions of right and of duty. 



656 THE ADMISSION OP CALIFORNIA 

I assume then, to-day, Mr. Chairman, no character of a pacifi- 
cator. I have no new plan of adjustment or reconciliation to 
offer for the difTiculties and dissensions in which we are unhap- 
pily involved. 

Still less, Sir, have I sought the floor for the purpose of enter- 
ing into fresh controversy with anybody in this House or else- 
where. Not even the gratuitous imputations, the second-hand 
perversions and stale sarcasms, of the honorable member from 
Connecticut, (Mr. Cleveland,) a few days ago, can tempt me to 
employ another hour of this session in the mere cut and thrust 
of personal encounter. I pass from that honorable member with 
the single remark, that it required more than all his vehement 
and turgid declamation against others, who, as he suggested, 
were shaping their course with a view to some official promotion 
or reward, to make me, or, as I think, to make this House, forget, 
that the term of one of his own Connecticut Senators was soon 
about to expire, that the Connecticut Legislature was just about 
to assemble, and that the honorable member himself was well 
understood to be a prominent candidate for the vacancy ! 

And I shall be equally brief with the distinguished member 
from Pennsylvania, (Mr. Wilmot,) who honored me with another 
shaft from the self-same quiver on Friday last. I will certainly 
not take advantage of his absence to deal with him at any 
length. But I cannot forbear saying, that as I heard him pour- 
ing forth so bitter an invective, so pitiless a philippic, against 
Southern arrogance and Northern recreancy, and as I observed 
the sleek complacency with which he seemed to congratulate 
himself that he alone had been proof against all the seductions 
of patronage and all the blandishments of power, I could not 
help remembering that his name was an historical name more 
than a century ago, and the lines in which a celebrated poet had 
embalmed it for immortality, came unbidden to my lips : 



" Shall parts so various aim at nothing new ? 
He'll shine a Tully and a Wilmot too 1 



, 1" 



My object to-day, Mr. Chairman, is the simple and humble 
one of expressing my own views on matters in regard to which I 
have, in some quarters, been, either intentionally or unintention- 



AND THE ADJUSTMENT OF THE SLAVERY QUESTION. 657 

ally, misunderstood and misrepresented. The end of my hour will 
find me, I fear, with even this work but half accomplished ; and 
I must rely on being judged by what shall be printed hereafter, 
rather than by what I may succeed in saying now. I will not, 
however, make my little less, by wasting any more of my time 
in an empty exordium, but will proceed at once to the business 
in hand. 

Anc|, in the first place, Sir, I desire to explain, at the expense 
of some historical narrative and egotistical reference, the position 
which I have heretofore occupied in relation to a certain anti- 
slavery proviso, which has been the immediate occasion of most 
of those sectional dissensions by which our domestic peace 
has been of late so seriously disturbed. 

I need not say. Sir, that I am no stranger to that proviso, 
though, during the whole of the last Congress, I was precluded, 
by my position in the chair of the House, from giving any vote, 
or uttering any voice, in regard to it. 

There are those here to-day, and I might single out, in no 
spirit of unkindness certainly, the present chairman of the Com- 
mittee of Ways and Means, (Mr. Bayly,) as one of them, who 
have often taken pains to remind the House and the country, 
that this proviso was formally proposed by me to a bill for esta- 
blishing a government in the Oregon territory, before the honor- 
able member from Pennsylvania, whose name it now bears, (Mr. 
Wilmot,) had entered upon his Congressional career. 

I have never denied this allegation. I have never desired to 
deny it. The fact is upon record ; and I would not erase or 
alter that record if it were in my power to do so. But, Sir, I 
have often desired, and always intended, whenever I should 
again be free to take part in the discussions of this body, to 
recall to the remembrance of the House and of the country, the 
circumstances under which, and the views with which, that pro- 
position was made. 

It was made, Mr. Chairman, on the 1st day of February, 
1845. And what was the condition of the country, and of the 
public affairs of the country, on that day ? 

Oregon was then a disputed territory. We were engaged at 
that time, Sir, in negotiations with Great Britain, in respect to 



658 THE ADMISSION OF CALIFORNIA 

the conflicting claims of the two countries to that remote region. 
Those negotiations had been long protracted, and had engen- 
dered a spirit of restless impatience on the subject, in the minds 
of a great portion of the American people. The question, too, 
had been drawn, — as, I regret to say, almost every question in 
this country seems destined to be drawn, — into the perilous 
vortex of party politics ; and a Democratic Presidential triumph 
had just been achieved, under a banner on which were legibly 
inscribed the well-remembered figures 54*** 40', and the well- 
remembered phrase, " the whole or none." 

Under these circumstances. Sir, a bill was introduced into this 
House, to extend the jurisdiction of the United States over the 
whole territory in dispute, and to authorize the assumption and 
exercise of one of the highest attributes of exclusive sovereignty, 
by granting lands to settlers. 

The bill was in other respects highly objectionable. It pro- 
vided for carrying on a government by the appointment of only 
two officers — a governor and a judge — who were to have ab- 
solute authority to promulgate and enforce, throughout the ter- 
ritory of Oregon, any and all laws which they might see fit to 
select from the statutes of any State or Territory in the Union. 
The whole destinies of Oregon were thus to be confided to the 
discretion of two men, who were to make up a code of laws to 
suit themselves, by picking and culling at pleasure from all the 
statute books of the country. They were at liberty, as the bill 
stood — although the entire territory was above the latitude of 
36*^ 30' — to adopt a slave code or a free code, as might be most 
agreeable to their own notions ; and there was, at that very mo- 
ment, lying upon the tables before us, a report from the Indian 
agent or sub-agent in that quarter, from which it appeared, that 
a number of the native Indians had already been captured and 
enslaved by the white settlers, and that they were held in a state 
of absolute and unjustifiable bondage. 

It was under these circumstances, Mr. Chairman, that I moved 
the proviso in question ; and I now read, from a speech printed 
at the time, the remarks which I made on the occasion : 

" One limitation upon the discretion of these two irresponsible law-givers ought cer- 
tainly to be imposed, if this bill is to pass. As it now stands, there is nothing to pre- 



AND THE ADJUSTMENT OF THE SLAVERY QUESTION. 659 

vent them from legalizing the existence of domestic slavery in Oregon. It seems to 
be understood, that this institution is to be limited by the terms of the Missouri com- 
promise, and is nowhere to be permitted in the American Union above the latitude of 
36° 30'. There is nothing, however, to enforce this understanding in the present 
case. The published documents prove that Indian slavery already exists in Oregon. 
I intend, therefore, to move, whenever it is in order to do so, the insertion of an ex- 
press declaration, that 'there shall neither be slavery nor involuntary servitude in this 
Territory, except for crime, whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.' " 

I did not stop here, however, Sir. Tiie whole argument of 
my speech on that occasion, with the exception of the single 
sentence which I have cited, was against the passage of the bill 
in any form. 

"I am in hopes, Mr. Chairman, (such was my distinct avowal,) that the bill will not 
become a law at the present session in any shape. Every thing conspires, in my judg- 
ment, to call for the postponement of any such measure to a future day." 

The great and paramount objection to the bill, in my mind, 
was that it would jeopard the peace of the country ; that it 
would break up the amicable negotiations in which we were 
engaged, and would leave no other alternative for settling the 
vexed question of title between us and Great Britain, but the 
stern arbitrament of war. 

Entertaining this opinion, I aimed at defeating the measure 
by every means in my power ; and it was well understood, at 
the time, that this very proviso was one of the means upon 
which I mainly relied for the purpose. I deliberately designed, 
by moving it, to unite the Southern Democracy with the con- 
servative Whigs of both the North and the South, in opposition 
to the bill, and thus to insure its defeat. 

The motion prevailed. The proviso was inserted by a vote 
of 131 to 69. And I, for one, then carried out my opposition 
to the bill by voting against it, proviso and all. The Southern 
Democracy, however, did not go with me on this vote. Not a 
few of them, — the present Speaker of the House among the 
number, — all of them, indeed, who were present, except four, 
voted in favor of the bill, notwithstanding the anti-slavery 
clause ; and accordingly it passed the House. But there can 
be little doubt that this clause had its influence in arresting the 
bill in the other wing of the Capitol, where it remained unacted 
upon until the close of the session, and was thus finally lost. 



/ 

/ 



660 THE ADMISSION OF CALIFORNIA 

Sir, a bill to create a territorial government in Oregon, con- 
taining this identical proviso, has since been passed through 
both Houses of Congress, and has received the sanction and 
signature of a Southern Democratic President; and I do not 
suppose, therefore, that this original motion of mine will be 
hereafter so frequent a subject of Southern Democratic censure, 
as it hitherto has been. But I have desired to place upon 
record, in perpetuam memoriam rei, this plain, unvarnished his- 
tory of the case ; and having done so, I willingly submit myself 
to whatever measure of censure or reproach such a state of facts 
may fairly subject me to, either from the South or from the 
North. If the ofTering of this proviso to this bill, under these 
circumstances, with these views, and with this result, be the 
unpardonable offence which it has sometimes been styled, I can 
only say, " adsum, qui feci; in me convertite ferrum I " Nay, Sir, 
I will say further, that if it be fairly traceable to this movement 
of mine, that it is no longer an open question whether domestic 
slavery shall find a foothold in the Territory of Oregon, I shall 
feel that it has not been entirely in vain, that I have been for 
ten years associated with the public councils of my country. 

I come next, Mr. Chairman, to the proviso, which has more 
legitimately received the name of the honorable member from 
Pennsylvania, (Mr. Wilmot.) And it is not less important in 
this case, than in the other, to recall to the remembrance of the 
House and of the country the circumstances under which this 
proviso, also, was proposed. 

I think, Sir, that no one, who was a member of Congress at 
the time, will soon forget the eighth day of August, 1846. The 
country was at war with Mexico, and Congress was within eight- 
and-forty hours of the appointed close of a most protracted and 
laborious session. We were already almost exhausted by hot 
weather and hot work, and all the energies which were left us 
were required for winding up that great mass of public business 
which always awaits the closing hours, whether of a longer or a 
shorter session. Under these circumstances, a message was 
received by this House from President Polk, calling for an appro- 
priation of money to enable him to negotiate a treaty of peace, 
and intimating, by a distinct reference to the precedent of the 



AND THE ADJUSTMENT OF THE SLAVERY QUESTION. 661 

purchase of Louisiana, that he designed to employ this money 
in the acquisition of more territory. 

Such a message, I need not say. Sir, took all who were not in 
the President's secrets greatly by surprise. The idea of bringing 
money to the aid of our armies for the purpose of buying a peace 
from a nation like Mexico, could not fail to inflict a severe wound 
upon our national pride ; while the lust of territorial acquisition 
and aggrandizement, which was thus plainly betrayed, gave a 
deeper dye of injustice and rapine to the war into which we had 
been so recklessly plunged. 

No time was afforded us, however, for reflections or delibera- 
tions of any sort. The message was referred at once to the 
Committee of the Whole on the State of the Union, and a bill 
was forthwith originated in that committee, under the lead of 
General McKay, of North Carolina, for placing two millions of 
dollars at the unlimited discretion of the President. 

For the debate upon this bill, two or three hours of a hot 
summer afternoon were grudgingly allowed by the Democratic 
majority in this House, and these two or three hours were di- 
vided off into homoeopathic portions of five minutes each. My 
honorable friend from New York, (Mr. Hugh White,) — the 
senior member of the New York delegation, and who, I hope, 
will long remain here to enjoy the dignity of that position — 
obtained the floor for the first five minutes, and I was fortunate 
or unfortunate enough to follow him. No amendment to the 
bill had then been adopted, and no proviso moved. But here is 
what I said on that occasion, as reported in the National Intelli- 
gencer at the time : 

" Mr. Winthrop said that he should follow the OKample of his friend from New York, 
(Mr. White,) and confine himself to a brief statement of his views, reserving to him- 
self the privilege of amplifying and enforcing them hereafter. The Administration 
and its friends had thought fit during the present session to frame more than one of 
their most important measures, so as to leave their opponents in a false position which- 
ever way they voted. There were two things which he had not imagined, in advance, 
that any circumstances could have constrained him to do, and from which lie would 
gladly have been spared. One of them was to give a vote which might appear to lend 
an approving sanction to a war which had been caused by the annexation of Texas ; 
the other was to give a vote which might appear like an opposition to the earliest restora- 
tion of peace, either with Mexico or any other power on earth. But he must let appear- 
ances take care of themselves. He was not here to pronounce opinions either upon the 

.56 



662 THE ADMISSION OF CALIFORNIA 

preamble of a bill or the phrases of a President's message. He was here to vote on 
substantial provisions of law, proposed with a view to their practical interpretation and 
execution. One of these votes he had given already, under circumstances which were 
familiar to the House and to the country. He believed it then, and he believed it now, 
upon the most deliberate reflection, to be the best vote of which the case admitted- 
And now, he greatly feared, that he was about to be compelled to give the other of 
these abhorrent votes. He could not and would not vote for this bill as it now stood. 

" What was the bill ? A bill to place two millions of dollars at the disposal of the 
President ' for any extraordinary emergencies which might arise out of our intercourse 
with foreign nations.' Not a word about peace. Not a word about Mexico. Not a 
syllable about the disputed boundaries on the Rio Grande. It was a vote of unlimited 
confidence in an Administration, in which, he was sorry to say, there was very little con- 
fidence to be placed. They might employ this money towards buying California, or 
buying Cuba, or buying Yucatan, or buying the Sandwich Islands, or buying any 
other territory they might fancy in either hemisphere. If we turned to the message of 
the President, it was hardly more satisfactory. Nothing could be more evident than 
that tills appropriation was asked for as the earnest money for a purchase of more 
territory. The message expressly stated that it was to be used in part payment for 
any concessions which Mexico might make to us. The President already had the 
claims of our citizens to deal with to the amount of three millions or more. Here 
were two millions more to be placed in his hand, in cash. What was to be the whole 
payment, for which five millions of dollars was wanted as an advance 1 And where 
was this territory to be ? The message, as if not willing to leave us wholly in the 
dark, had pointed expressly to the example of 1803 — to the purchase of Louisiana — 
and this very bill (as Mr. W. understood) had been copied verbatim from the act by 
which that purchase was indirectly sanctioned. The President has thus called upon 
us, in language not to be misunderstood, to sanction, in advance, a new and indefinite 
acquisition of southern territory. To such an acquisition he (Mr. W.) was opposed. 
He had said heretofore, and he repeated now, that he was uncompromisingly opposed 
to extending the slaveholding territory of the Union. He wanted no more territory of 
any sort ; but of this we had more than enough already. 

" He cordially responded to the President's desires to bring about a just and honor- 
able peace at the earliest moment. Nothing would give him more real satisfaction than 
to join in a measure honestly proposed for that purpose. He did not grudge the pay- 
ment of the two millions. He would appropriate twenty millions for the legitimate 
purposes of a treaty of peace, without a moment's hesitation. And he still hoped that 
this measure might assume a shape in which he could give it his support. Limit the 
discretion of the President to a settlement of those boundaries which have been the 
subject of dispute. Hold him to his solemn pledges, twice repeated, that he would be 
ready at all times to settle the existing differences between the two countries on the 
most liberal terms. Give him no countenance in his design to take advantage of the 
present war to force Mexico into the surrender, or even the sale, of any of her pro- 
vinces. If anybody wants a better harbor on the Pacific, let him wait till it can be 
acquired with less of national dishonor. But whatever you do or omit to do, give us 
at least to be assured that this appropriation is not to be applied to the annexation of 
anotlicr Texas, or even to the purchase of another Louisiana." [Here the hammer fell] 

This, Mr. Chairman, was my five minutes' speech on that 
memorable occasion. It was " brief as the posy of a ring ; " 



AND THE ADJUSTMENT OF THE SLAVERY QUESTION. 663 

but it contained quite as much substance as some that are longer. 
It embraced three distinct ideas : first, that I was opposed to the 
continuance, as I had been to the commencement, of the war 
with Mexico, and that I was ready to vote for any amount of 
money which might be demanded for the legitimate purposes of 
negotiating a treaty of peace ; second, that I desired no further 
acquisition of territory on any side or of any sort; and third, 
that I was uncompromisingly opposed to extending the slave- 
holding territory of the Union. 

And in conformity with this last view, when the honorable 
member from Pennsylvania (Mr. Wilmot) offered his celebrated 
proviso not long afterwards, I unhesitatingly voted for it. 

Sir, I have never regretted that vote ; nor have I ever changed, 
in any degree, the opinions and the principles upon which it was 
founded. Again and again, I have reiterated those opinions and 
vindicated those principles ; and as my consistency and stead- 
fastness on this point have been artfully drawn into question in 
some quarters, I must be pardoned for a few citations from 
speeches of my own, in which I have had occasion to allude to 
the subject, both in this House and elsewhere. 

Here, Sir, in the first place, is an extract from a speech deli- 
vered by me in Faneuil Hall, on the 23d day of September, 
1846, hardly more than six weeks after the occasion which I 
have just described : 

" Sir, upon all the great points of this question, there is no difference of opinion 
whatever. All agree, that this war ought never to have been commenced. All agree, 
that it ought to be brought to a close at the earliest practicable moment. No man 
present denies that it originated, primarily, in the annexation of Texas ; and second- 
arily, in the marching of the American Army into the disputed territory beyond the 
Nueces. And no man present fiiils to deplore and to condemn both of these measures. 
Nor is there a Whig in this assembly, nor, in my opinion, a Whig throughout the 
Union, who does not deprecate, from the bottom of his heart, any prosecution of this 
war, for the purpose of aggression, invasion, or conquest. 

" This, this is the matter, in which we take the deepest concern this day. Where, 
when, is this war to end, and what are to be its fruits 1 Unquestionably, we are 
not to forget that it takes two to make a bargain. Unquestionably, we are not to 
forget, that Mexico must be willing to negotiate, before our own government can be 
held wholly responsible for the failure of a treaty of peace. I rejoice, for one, that 
the administration have shown what little readiness they have shown, for bringing the 
war to a conclusion. I have given them credit, elsewhere, for their original overtures 
last autumn ; and I shall not deny them whatever credit they deserve for their renewed 



664 THE ADMISSION OF CALIFORNIA 

overtures now. But, Mr. President, it is not everything which takes the name or the 
form of an overture of peace, which is entitled to respect as such. If it proposes un- 
just and unreasonable terms : if it manifests an overbearing and oppressive spirit; if 
it presumes on the power of those who make it, or on the weakness of those to whom 
it is offered, to exact hard and heartless conditions ; if, especially, it be of a character 
at once offensive and injurious to the rights of one of the nations concerned, and to 
the principles of a large majority of the other; then it prostitutes the name of peace, 
and its authors are only entitled to the contempt which belongs to those who add 
hypocrisy to injustice. 

" Sir, when the President of the United States, on a sudden and serious emergency, 
demanded of Congress the means of meeting a war, into which he had already 
plunged the country, he pledged himself, in thrice repeated terms, to be ready at 
all times to settle the existing disputes between us and Mexico, whencTcr Mexico 
should be willing either to make or to receive propositions to that end. To that 
pledge he stands solemnly recorded, in the sight of God and of men. Now, Sir, it 
was no part of our existing disputes, at that time, whether we should have possession 
of California, or of any other territory beyond the Eio Grande. And the President, 
in prosecuting plans of invasion and conquest, which look to the permanent acquisi- 
tion of any such territories, will be as false to his own pledges, as he is to the honor 
and interests of his country. 

"I believe that I speak the sentiments of the whole people of Massachusetts — I 
know I speak my own — in saying that we want no more territorial possessions, to 
become the nurseries of new slave States. It goes hard enough Avith us, that the men 
and money of the nation should be employed for the defence of such acquisitions, 
already made ; but to originate new enterprises for extending the area of slavery by 
force of arms, is revolting to the moral sense of every American freeman. 

" Sir, I trust there is no man here who is not ready to stand by the Constitution of 
the country. I trust there is no man here who is not willing to hold fast to the Union 
of the States, be its limits ultimately fixed a little on one side, or a little on the other 
side, of the line of his own choice. Por myself, I will not contemplate the idea of the 
dissolution of the Union, in any conceivable event. There are no boundaries of sea or 
land of rock or river, of desert or mountain, to which I Avill not try, at least, to carry 
out my love of country, whenever they shall really be the boundaries of my country. 
If the dav of dissolution ever comes, it shall bring the evidence of its own irresistible 
necessity with it. I avert my eyes from all recognition of such a necessity in the dis- 
tance. Nor am I ready for any political organizations or platforms less broad and 
comprehensive than those which may include and uphold the whole Whig party of 
the United States. But all this is consistent, and shall, in my own case, practically 
consist, with a just sense of the evils of slavery; with an earnest opposition to every- 
thing designed to prolong or extend it; with a firm resistance to all its encroachments 
on Northern rights ; and above all, with an uncompromising hostility to all measures 
for introducing new slave States and new slave Territories into our Union." 

I come next, Mr. Chairman, to a speech delivered in this 
House, on the yth of January, 1847, when I found it necessary 
to oppose the passage of a bill for raising an additional military 
force. I think the bill was called the Ten Regiment bill. 

On that occasion, after alluding to the probable influence of 



AND THE ADJUSTMENT OF THE SLAVERY QUESTION. 665 

the measure under consideration on the chances of a peace with 
Mexico, I proceeded to say, as follows : 

" And where, too, is to be our domestic peace, if this policy is to be pursued ? 
According to the President's plan of obtaining ' ample indemnity for the expenses of 
the war,' the longer the war lasts, and the more expensive it is made, tiie more terri- 
tory we shall require to indemnify us. Every dollar of appropriation for this war is 
thus the purchase-money of more acres of Mexican soil. Who knows how much of 
Chihuahua, and Coahuila, and New Leon, and Durango, it .will take to remunerate 
us for the expenses of these ten regiments of regulars, who are to be enlisted for five 
years ? And to what end are we thus about to add acre to acre and field to field '< 
To furnish the subject of that great domestic struggle, which has already been fore- 
shadowed in this debate ! 

" Mr. Chairman, I have no time to discuss the subject of slavery on this occasion, 
nor should I desire to discuss it in this connection, if I had more time. But I must 
not omit a few plain words on the momentous issue which has now been raised. I 
speak for Massachusetts — I believe I speak the sentiments of all New England, and 
of many other States out of New England, — when I say, that upon this question onr 
minds ai-e made up. So far as we have power — constitutional or moral power — to 
control political events, we are resolved that there shall be no further extension of the 
territory of this Union, subject to the institutions of slavery 

" I believe the North is ready to stand by the Constitution, with all its compromises, 
as it now is. I do not intend, moreover, to throw out any threats of disunion, what- 
ever may be the result. I do not intend, now or ever, to contemplate disunion as a 
cure for any imaginable evil. At the same time I do not intend to be driven from a 
firm expression of purpose, and a steadfast adherence to principle, by any threats of 
disunion from any other quarter. The people of New England, whom I have any 
privilege to speak for, do not desire, as I understand their views — I know my own 
heart and my own principles, and can at least speak for them — to gain one foot of 
territory by conquest, and as the result of the prosecution of the war with Mexico. I 
do not believe that even the abolitionists of the North — though I am ona of the last 
persons who would be entitled to speak their sentiments — would be unwilling to be 
found in combination with Southern gentlemen, who may see fit to espouse this doc- 
trine. We desire peace. We believe that this war ought never to have been com- 
menced, and we do not wish to have it made the pretext for plundering Mexico of one 
foot of her lands. But if the war is to be prosecuted, and if territories are to be con- 
quered and annexed, we shall stand fiist and forever to the principle that, so far as we 
are concerned, these territories shall be the exclusive abode of freemen. 

'■ Mr. Chairman, peace, peace is the grand compromise of this question between the 
North and the South. Let the President abandon all schemes of further conquest. 
Let him abandon his plans of pushing his forces to the heart of Mexico. Now, before 
any reverses have been experienced by the American arms, he can do so with the 
highest honor. Let him exhibit a spirit of magnanimity towards a weak and distracted 
neighbor. Let him make distinct proclamation of the terms on which he is ready to 
negotiate ; and let those terms be such as shall involve no injustice towards Mexico, 
and engender no sectional strife among ourselves. But, at all events, let him tell us 
what those terms are to be. A proclamation of Executive purposes is essential to 
any legislative or any national harmony. The North ought to know them, the South 
ought to know them, the whole country ought to understand for what ends its blood 

~ a * 
00 



666 THE ADMISSION OF CALIFORNIA 

and treasure are to be expended. It is high time that some specific terms of accom- 
modation were proclaimed to Congress, to Mexico, and to the world. If they be rea- 
sonable, no man will hesitate to unite in supplying whatever means may be necessary 
for enforcing them." 

I come lastly, Mr. Chairman, to a speech which I made in 
this House on the 22d of February, 1847, and from which I 
shall venture to quote a still longer extract. It was on this 
occasion. Sir, and in connection with these remarks, that I 
offered to the bill then pending — which was a bill making an 
appropriation of nearly thirty-five millions of dollars for the 
single item of supporting the army — a proviso in the following 
words: 

" Provided, further, That these appropriations are made with no view of sanctioning 
any prosecution of the existing war with Mexico for the acquisition of territory to 
form new States to be added to the Union, or for the dismemberment in any way of 
the Eepublic of Mexico." 

That, Sir, was my proviso. And if anybody shall ever deem 
my name worthy of being associated with any legislative pro- 
position, I hope this one will not be forgotten. I am willing 
that it should be known in all time to come as the Winthrop 
proviso. 

It was indeed almost identical with a resolution proposed in 
the other branch of Congress, by an honorable Senator from 
Georgia, (Mr. Berrien,) and it shared the same fate with his 
resolution. Every Whig member present at the time, except 
one, voted in favor of its adoption. There were seventy-six 
Whigs in all, from all parts of the country. North and South, 
East and West, whose names are inscribed on the journals in 
favor of this proviso. But no Democrat voted for it ; not one. 
And among the names of the one hundred and twenty-four 
Democrats who defeated it, may be seen those of the honorable 
member from Pennsylvania, (Mr. Wilmot,) and of the honora- 
ble member from New York, (Mr. Preston King,) side by side 
with those of the present Speaker of this House, (Mr. Cobb,) 
of the present chairman of this committee, (Mr. Boyd,) and of 
all the other Southern Democrats of the day. 

It was on this occasion, Sir, that I expressed myself as fol- 
lows : 



AND THE ADJUSTMENT OF THE SLAVERY QUESTION. G67 

" Mr. Chairman, I have intimated on another occasion that I do not go so far as 
some of my friends in regard to the propriety or expediency of withholding all sup- 
plies from the Executive. While a foreign nation is still in arms against us, I would 
limit the supplies to some reasonable scale of defence, and not withhold them 
altogether. I would pay for all services of regulars or volunteers already contracted 
for. I would provide ample means to prevent our army from suft'cring, whether from 
the foe or from famine, as long as they are in the held under constitutional authority. 
Heaven forbid that our gallant troops should be left to perish for want of supplies 
because they are on a foreign soil, while they are liable to be shot down by the com- 
mand of their own officers if they refuse to remain there! But I cannot regard it as 
consistent with constitutional or republican principles to pass this bill as it now stands. 
Even if I approved the war, I should regard such a course of legislation as unwarrant- 
able. Disapproving it, as I unequivocally and unqualifiedly do, I am the more induced 
to interpose these objections to its adoption. 

" Sir, this whole Executive policy of overrunning Mexico to obtain territorial indem- 
nities for pecuniary claims and the expenses of the war, is abhorrent to every idea of 
humanity and of honor. For one, I do not desire the acquisition of one inch of terri- 
tory by conquest. I desire to see no fields of blood annexed to this Union, whether 
the price of the treachery by which they have been procured shall be three million 
pieces of silver or only thirty ! I want no more areas of freedom. Area, if I remem- 
ber right, signified threshing-floor, in my old school dictionary. We have had enough 
of these areas, whether of freedom or slavery ; and I trust this war will be brought to 
a close without multiplying or extending them. 

" I repeat this the more emphatically, lest my vote in favor of the Three Million bill 
should be misinterpreted. Nothing was further from my intention, in giving that vote. 
than to sanction the policy of the Executive in regard to the territories of Mexico. If 
he insists, indeed, on pursuing that policy, and if a majority of Congress insist on 
giving him the means, I prefer purchase to conquest ; and had rather authorize the 
expenditure of three millions to pay Mexico, than of thirty millions to whip her. But 
everybody must have understood that the proviso was a virtual nullification of the bill, 
for any purpose of acquiring territory, in the hands of a southern administration. 

"It was for that proviso that I voted. I wished to get the great principle which it 
embodied fiiirly on the statute-book. I believe it to be a perfectly constitutional princi- 
ple, and an eminently conservative principle 

" I have said that I regarded this principle as eminently conservative, as well as 
entirely constitutional. I do believe, Sir, that whenever the principle of this proviso 
shall be irrevocably established , shall be considered as unchangeable as the laws of the 
Medes and Persians, then, and not till then, we shall have permanent peace with other 
countries, and fixed boundaries for our own country. It is plain that there are two 
parties in the free States. Both of them are opposed — uncompromisingly opposed, 
as I hope and believe — to the extension of slavery. One of them, however, and that 
the party of the present Administration, are for the widest extension of territory, sub- 
ject to the anti-slavery proviso. The other of them, and that the party to which I 
have the honor to belong, are, as I believe, content with the Union as it is, desire no 
annexation of new States, and are utterly opposed to the prosecution of tliis war for 
any purpose of dismembering Mexico. Between these two parties in the free States 
the South holds the balance of power. It may always hold it. If now, therefore, it 
will join in putting an end to this war, and in arresting the march of conquest upon 
which our armies have entered, the limits of the llepublic as well as the limits of 
slavery may be finally established 



668 THE ADMISSION OF CALIFORNIA 

" If we could at last lay down permanently the boundary of our Republic — if we 
could feel that we had extinguished forever the lust of extended dominion in the 
bosoms of the American peoi)le — if we could present that old god Terminus, of whom 
we have heard such eloquent mention elscAvhere, not with outstretched arm still point- 
ing to new territories in the distance, but with limbs lopped off, as the Romans some- 
times repi-esented him, betokening that he had reached his very furthest goal — if we 
could be assured that our limits were to be no further advanced, either by purchase or 
conquest, by fraud or by force — then, then we might feel that we had taken a bond of 
fate for the perpetuation of our Union. 

'•It is in this spirit that I voted for the proviso in the Three Million bill. It is in 
this spirit that I otTer the third proviso to the Thirty Million bill before us. Pass them 
both — cut off, by one and the same stroke, all idea both of the extension of slavery 
and the extension of territory — and we shall neither need the three millions, nor the 
thirty millions, for securing peace and harmony, both at home and abroad." 

Mr. Chairman, I know not but that I might be induced to 
abate something of the ambitious rhetoric of these remarks, if I 
were making the speech over again ; but I do not desire to 
change one jot or tittle of their substantial matter. I adhere, 
this day, to all the sentiments and all the principles of that 
speech ; and, so far as they are applicable to the present moment 
and to existing circumstances, and so far as may consist with 
the paramount duty which I owe to the peace and the union of 
my country, I intend to shape my course with a view of carrying 
them out to their practical fulfilment. 

I have long ago made up my mind, that, whatever prospect 
there may be of adjusting and reconciling the conflicting inter- 
ests and claims of different portions of the Union, there is no 
prospect, and no possibility, of harmonizing their discordant 
opinions. Certainly, Sir, neither labored arguments, nor heated 
appeals, nor angry menaces ; neither threats of disorganization 
here, nor of conventions elsewhere, have done any thing towards 
accomplishing such a result, so far as I am concerned. 

I hold now, as I held three years ago, that it is entirely consti- 
tutional for Congress to apply the principles of the ordinance of 
1787 to any territory which may be added to the Union. 

I hold now, as I held then, that the South have no right to 
complain of such an application of these principles by those of 
us who have declared this doctrine in advance, and who have 
steadily opposed all acquisition of territory. 

I Jiold now, as I held then, that their reproaches and fulmina- 



AND THE ADJUSTMENT OF THE SLAVERY QUESTION. 6G9 

tions ought to be exclusively reserved for those among them- 
selves, and for their allies ia other parts of the country, who 
have persisted in bringing this territory into the Union, with the 
distinct understanding that it was " to furnish the subject of this 
great domestic struggle." 

1 hold now, too, as I held then, that one of tiie greatest 
advantages of ingrafting these principles unchangeably upon 
our national policy, would be to extinguish the spirit of annexa- 
tion and conquest in the region where we must all acknowledge 
that it has ever been most rife, and thus to secure for us " perma- 
nent peace with other countries, and fixed boundaries for our 
own country." 

Do you remember, Mr. Chairman, that old classical dialogue 
between Pyrrhus, the King of Epirus, and his eloquent counsel- 
lor, Cineas ? Pyrrhus, we are told, in disclosing his plans of 
government, had stated his purpose of subjecting Italy to his 
sway ; when Cineas asked, " And having overcoine the Romans, 
u^hat will your majesty do next ? " " Why, Sicily, said the 
King, " is next door to Italy, and it will be easy to subdue 
that." " And having got possession of Sicily," said the counsel- 
lor, " what next will be your royal pleasure ? " "I have a mind 
then," said Pyrrhus, " to pass over into Africa." " And what 
after that?" said Cineas. " Why then, at last, we will give 
ourselves up to quiet, and enjoy a delightful peace." " But 
what," rejoined the wise and sagacious counsellor, " what pre- 
vents you from enjoying that quiet and that delightful peace 
now ? " 

I can conceive such a dialogue passing between one of our 
late American Presidents and some confidential friend or cabi- 
net adviser. " I have a mind to annex Texas." " And what 
will you do next ?" " Why, Mexico is next door to Texas, and 
it will be easy to subject her to our arms." " And having 
conquered Mexico, and taken possession of such of her pro- 
vinces as you desire, what next does your excellency propose?" 
" I think we shall then be ready for passing over to Cuba." 
" And what after that ? " " Why, then, we will devote ourselves 
to peace, and enjoy a quiet life." " And why, why — it might 
well have been asked — should you not enjoy that peace and 



670 THE ADMISSION OF CALIFORNIA 

quiet now? Why will you persist in disturbing the quiet, and 
perilling the peace, and putting in jeopardy the glorious Union 
which you now enjoy by rushing into so wild, so wanton, and, I 
had almost said, so wicked a policy ?" 

Sir, it is not to be denied that it is this spirit of annexation 
and conquest, growing by what it feeds on, which has involved 
us in all our present troubles, and which threatens us with still 
greater troubles in future. We are reaping the natural and just 
results of the annexation of Texas, and of the war which inevi- 
tably followed that annexation. We have almost realized the 
fate of the greedy and ravenous bird in the old fable, ^sop 
tells us of an eagle, which, in one of its towering flights, seeing 
a bit of tempting flesh upon an altar, pounced upon it, and bore 
it away in triumph to its nest. But, by chance, he adds, a coal 
of fire from the altar was sticking to it at the time, which set fire 
to the nest and consumed it in a trice. And our American eagle, 
Sir, has been seen stooping from its pride of place, and hovering 
over the altars of a weak neighboring power. It has at last 
pounced upon her provinces, and borne them away from her 
in triumph. But burning coals have clung to them I Discord 
and confusion have come with them ! And our own American 
homestead is now threatened with conflagration I 

This, Mr. Chairman, is the brief history of our condition. I 
trust in Heaven that the lesson will not be lost upon us. Gentle- 
men talk of settling the whole controversy which has been 
kindled between the North and the South by some sweeping 
compromise, or some comprehensive plan of reconciliation. I 
hope that the controversy will be settled, Sir ; but I most 
earnestly hope and pray, that it will not so be settled, that we 
shall ever be in danger of forgetting its origin. I hope and pray 
that it will not so be settled, that we shall ever again imagine, 
that we can enter with impunity on a career of aggression, 
spoliation, and conquest I This embittered strife, this protracted 
suspense, these tedious days and weeks and months of anxiety 
and agitation, will have had their full compensation and reward, 
if they shall teach us never again to forget the curse which has 
been pronounced upon those "who remove their neighbors' 
landmarks;" — if they shall teach us to realize, in all time to 



AND THE ADJUSTMENT OF THE SLAVERY QUESTION. G71 

come, that a policy of peace and justice towards others, is the 
very law and condition of our own domestic harmony and our 
own national Union I 

And now, Mr. Chairman, how is the great controversy by 
which our country is agitated, to be settled ? 

In the first place. Sir, I do not believe that it is to be settled 
by multiplying and accumulating issues. I have no faith in 
the plan of raking open all the subjects of disagreement and 
difference which have existed at any time between different sec- 
tions of the country, with a view of attempting to bring them 
within the influence of some single panacea. Certainly, Sir, if 
such a plan is to be attempted, we are not to forget that there 
are two sides to the question of aggression. The Southern 
States complain, on the one side, that some of their runaway 
slaves have not been delivered up by the free States, agreeably 
to the provisions of the Constitution of the United States. The 
Northern States complain, on the other side, that some of their 
frfeemen have been seized and imprisoned in the slave States, 
contrary to the provisions of the same Constitution. I was, 
myself, called upon some years ago, by the merchants and ship- 
owners of Boston — as patriotic a body of men as can be found 
on the face of this continent, and whose zeal for liberty is not 
less conspicuous than their devotion to the Union — to bring this 
latter subject to the attention of Congress. I made a report 
upon it to this House in 1843, in which, among other remarks, 
I used the following language : 

" That American or foreign seamen, charged with no crime, and infected with no 
contagion, should be searched for on board the vessels to which they belong ; should 
be seized while in the discharge of their duties, or, it may be. while asleep in their 
berths ; should be dragged on shore and incarcerated without any other examination 
than an examination of their skins ; and should be rendered liable, in certain contin- 
gencies, over which they may have no possible control, to be subjected to the ignominy 
and agony of the lash, and even to the infinitely more ignominious and agonizing fiite 
of being sold into slavery for life, and all for purposes of police — is an idea too mon- 
strous to be entertained for a moment." 

Now, Sir, I will not undertake to compare the two grievances 
to which I have thus alluded. But this I do say, that if the one 
is to be insisted on as a subject for imnvediate redress and repa- 



672 THE ADMISSION OF CALIFORNIA 

ration, I see not why the other should not be also. For myself, 
I acknowledge my allegiance to the whole Constitution of the 
United States, and I am willing to unite in fulfilling and 
enforcing, in all reasonable and proper modes, every one of its 
provisions. I recognize, indeed, a Power above all human law- 
makers, and a code above all earthly constitutions ! And when- 
ever I perceive a plain conflict of jurisdiction and authority 
between the Constitution of my country and the laws of my 
God, my course is clear. I shall resign my office, whatever it 
may be, and renounce all connection with public service of any 
sort. Never, never, Sir, will I put myself under the necessity of 
calling upon God to witness my promise to support a Constitu- 
tion, any part of which I consider to be inconsistent with His 
commands. 

But it is a libel upon the Constitution of the United States ; 
and, what is worse, Sir, it is a libel upon the great and good 
men who framed, adopted, and ratified it ; it is a libel upon 
Washington, and Franklin, and Hamilton, and Madison, upon 
John Adams, and John Jay, and Rufus King; it is a libel upon 
them' all, and upon the whole American people of 1789, who 
sustained them in their noble work ; and upon all who, from that 
time to this, generation after generation, in any capacity, national, 
municipal, or state, have lifted their hands to heaven, in attest- 
ation of their allegiance to the Government of their country ; — it 
is a gross libel upon every one of them, to assert or insinuate 
that there is any such inconsistency ! Let us not do such dis- 
honor to the Fathers of the Republic, and to the framers of the 
Constitution. It is a favorite policy, I know, of some of the 
ultraists in my own part of the country, to stigmatize the Con- 
stitution of the United States as a pro-slavery compact. I deny 
it. Sir. I hold, on the other hand, that it is a pro-liberty com- 
pact; the most effective pro-liberty compact which the world has 
ever seen. Magna Charta not excepted ; and one which every 
friend to liberty — human liberty, or political liberty — ought 
steadfastly to maintain and support. 

" To secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our pos- 
terity," — this was the grand climax in that enumeration of its 
objects which constitutes its well-remembered preamble. This 



AND THE ADJUSTMENT OF THE SLAVERY QUESTION. 673 

was the object for which it was avowedly, and for which it was 
really, framed ; and this is the object which it has, in fact, beyond 
all other instruments, advanced and promoted. 

The Convention which framed that instrument found African 
slavery, indeed, a fixed fact upon our soil; and some of the pro- 
visions which they adopted, had undoubted and admitted refer- 
ence to that fact. But what is the legitimate interpretation of 
these provisions? It is a remark, I think, as old as Epictetus, 
that every thing has two handles ; and it is as true of these pro- 
visions as of every thing else, that we must take hold of them 
by the right handle, in order to understand their true design. 

We are told that the Constitution encouraged slavery, by pro- 
viding for the toleration of the African slave trade for twenty 
years. In my judgment. Sir, it should rather be said, that the 
Constitution struck a strong, and, as its framers undoubtedly 
believed, a fatal blow at slavery, by securing to the Federal' 
Government the power, which it never before possessed, to pro- 
hibit that trade at the end of twenty years. 

We are told that it encouraged slavery, by making it the basis 
of representation in this House. In my judgment it should 
rather be said, that it discouraged slavery, by taking away two 
fifths of that representation to which the Southern States would 
have been entitled on their black population, if that population 
had been a wholly free population. 

We are told that it encouraged slavery, by providing for the 
suppression of insurrections. But everybody knows, that this 
provision had as much reference to insurrections in the free States 
as in the slave States ; and that, in point of fact, it was Shays's 
rebellion in Massachusetts, which, being in progress at the very 
period when the Constitution was under consideration, gave an 
immediate impulse to the movement by which the power of in- 
terfering in such cases was conferred on the Federal Government. 
« Among the ripening incidents," said Mr. Madison, in his ac- 
count of the circumstances which led to the adoption of the 
Constitution, "was the insurrection of Shays, in Massachusetts, 
against her government, which was with difficulty suppressed, 
notwithstanding the influence on the insurgents of an appre- 
hended interposition of the Federal troops." 

57 



674 THE ADMISSION OF CALIFORNIA 

We are told, finally, that the Constitution encouraged slavery, 
by a provision for the surrender of persons " held to service or 
labor." Now, Sir, even this provision fulfils the suggestion 
which was made by Mr. Madison at the time the Constitution 
was framed, and " avoids the idea that there can be property in 
man." It demands of us only a recognition of the admitted 
and familiar fact, that there may be property in " the service or 
labor" of man. It provides for the restoration of all runaways 
alike, white or black, who may be " held to service or labor" for 
life or for years, as indented apprentices or otherwise, in any 
part of the country, — precluding all right on the part of any of the 
States to inquire, for any purpose of discrimination in regard to 
fugitives from other States, by what tenure, of temporary con- 
tract or of hereditary bondage, they are held to such " service or 
labor." If by some emancipation act, like that which was 
adopted many years ago by Great Britain in reference to her 
West India colonies, the slaves in our Southern States should be 
converted into apprentices for a term of years, this article of the 
Constitution would be just as applicable to that state of things, 
as it is to the state of things now existing. It has no necessary or 
exclusive relation to the existence of slavery. But taking it, as 
it was unquestionably intended, as a provision for the restoration 
of slaves, as long as slavery shall exist, is there enough in this 
clause of the Constitution, to justify any one in branding that 
instrument with the abhorrent title of a pro-slavery compact ? 

Sir, the Constitution is to be considered and judged of as a 
whole. The provisions which relate to the same subject-matter, 
certainly, are to be examined together, and compared with each 
other, in order to obtain a just interpretation of its real charac- 
ter and intent. Let this clause, then, be taken in connection 
with that which has authorized and effected the annihilation of 
the African slave trade, as a lawful trade, from any part of this 
vast American Union. Let the few cases in which individual 
fugitives may be remanded to their captivity, in conformity with 
one of these provisions, be compared with the countless instances 
in which whole shiploads of freemen would have been torn from 
their native soil and transported into slavery, but for the other; 
and then tell me, what is the just designation of the compact 



m 



AND THE ADJUSTMENT OF TUE SLAVERY QUESTION. 675 

which contains them both ! Suppose, Sir, for a moment, that 
the framers of the Constitution had resolved to ig-norc the exist- 
ence of slavery altogether; suppose that the idea, which I have 
sometimes heard suggested as a desirable one, had been adopted 
by them at the outset, and that all the preexisting rights of the 
States in regard to slavery and all its incidents had been left 
unrestricted and unaltered ; would that have better subserved 
the great cause of human liberty ? We should have had, indeed, 
no fugitive slave clause. But for every slave who made his 
escape, we should have had a hundred slaves, freshly brought 
over from Africa, Brazil, or the West Indies, as long as there 
was a foot of soil on which they could be profitably employed ; 
and every one of them must have been counted, not as three 
fifths, but as a whole man, to swell the basis of that represent- 
ation in this House and in the Electoral Colleges, by which the 
slave interest would have been rendered predominant forever in 
our land I 

Undoubtedly, Mr. Chairman, there are provisions in the Con- 
stitution which involve us in painful obligations, and from which 
some of us would rejoice to be relieved, and this is one of them. 
But there is none, none, in my judgment, which involves any 
conscientious or religious difficulty. I know no reservation, 
equivocation, or evasion, in the oath which I have so often 
taken to support that Constitution ; and whenever any measure 
is proposed to me for fulfilling or enforcing any one of its clear 
obligations or express stipulations, I shall give to it every degree 
of attention, consideration, and support, which the justice, the 
wisdom, the propriety, and the practicability of its peculiar pro- 
visions may demand or warrant. In legislating, however, for 
the restoration of Southern slaves, I shall not forget the security 
of Northern freemen. Nor, in testifying my allegiance to what 
has been termed the extradition clause of the Constitution, shall 
I overlook those great fundamental principles of all free govern- 
ments — the Habeas Corpus and the Trial by Jury. 

But I repeat, Mr. Chairman, that I am for giving a separate 
and independent consideration to separate and independent 
measures. I am for dealing with present and pressing difficul- 
ties by themselves, and for acting upon others afterwards as 
they arise. 



676 THE ADMISSION OF CALIFORNIA 

The great questions, which demand our consideration at this 
moment, are those which relate to our new territorial acquisi- 
tions ; and to them, and them alone, I am now for devoting 
myself. And the first of these questions is that which relates to 
California. 

What is California? But yesterday. Sir, it was a colony in 
embryo. But yesterday — to use the language which Mr. Burke 
once applied to America — it was " a little speck, scarce visible 
in the mass of national interest ; a small seminal principle, 
rather than a formed body." To-day, it presents itself to us as an 
established Commonwealth, and is knocking at our doors for 
admittance to the Union as a free and independent State. Shall 
it be turned away ? Shall it be remanded to its colonial condi- 
tion ? Shall we attempt to crowd back this full grown man 
into the cradle of infancy ? And that, too, in spite of the ex- 
press provisions of the treaty by which it was acquired, " that, 
at the proper time, it shall be incorporated into the Union ?" 

Upon what pretence shall such a step be taken? Why is not 
this the proper time ? Is it said that there has been some viola- 
tion of precedents in her preparatory proceedings ? Where will 
you find a precedent in any degree applicable to her condition ? 
When has such a case been presented in our past history ? 
When may we look for another such in our future progress ? 
" Who hath heard such a thing ? Who hath seen such things ? 
Shall the earth be made to bring forth in one day ? Or shall a 
nation be born at once ? " 

Is it said that she has not population enough ? The best 
accounts which we can obtain estimate her population at more 
than a hundred thousand souls ; and these, be it remembered, 
are nearly all full grown persons, and a vast majority of them 
men and voters. And what, after all, are any estimates of popu- 
lation worth, in such a case ? As the same great British ora- 
tor, whom I have just quoted, said of the American colonies in 
1775 : " Such is the strength with which population shoots in 
that part of the world, that, state the numbers as high as we 
will, whilst the dispute continues, the exaggeration ends. Whilst 
we are discussing any given magnitude, they are grown to it." 

Is it said that her boundaries are too extensive ? You did 



AND THE ADJUSTMENT OP THE SLAVERY QUESTION. 677 

not find this fault with Texas. Texas, with the boundaries 
which are claimed by her, has three hundred and twenty-five 
thousand five hundred and twenty square miles ; and, with any 
boundaries which are likely to be assigned to her, she will have 
more than two hundred thousand square miles. California, 
under her own Constitution, has but one hundred and fifty-five 
thousand five hundred and fifty square miles of territory, of 
which one half are mere mountains of rock and ice, and another 
quarter a desert waste ! 

Do you complain of the length of her sea-coast ? You did 
not find this fault with Florida, whose sea-coast and gulf-coast 
together, (if I am not greatly mistaken,) are more than one third 
longer than that of California. And where will you divide the 
great valley of the Sacramento and San Joaquin, without the 
greatest injury and injustice to those who dwell in it ? And for 
what will you divide it, except to make two free States, where 
only one is now proposed, and thus to double the cause of 
Southern jealousy and sectional opposition ? 

I declare to you. Sir, that, in my judgment, if any fault is to 
be found with the dimensions of California, it is to be found by 
the free States, who might reasonably look to have two States, 
instead of one, added to their number, from so vast a territory. 

Is it said that her Constitution has been cooked? Who 
cooked it ? That her people have been tampered with ? Who 
tampered with them ? As has been truly said, we have a 
Southern President and a majority of Southern men in the 
Cabinet; and they sent a Southern agent — a Georgia member 
of Congress* — a gentleman, let me say, for whose character and 
conduct I have the highest respect — to bear their despatches 
and communicate their views to the California settlers. 

Is it said that these settlers are a wild, reckless, floating popu- 
lation, bent only upon digging gold, and unworthy to be trusted 
in establishing a government? Sir, I do not believe a better 
class of emigrants was ever found flocking in such numbers to 
any new settlement on the face of the earth. The immense 
distance, the formidable difficulties, and the onerous expense of 
the pilgrimage to California, necessarily confined the emigration 

* Hon. T. Butler King. 
57* 



678 THE ADMISSION OF CALIFORNIA 

to men of some pecuniary substance, as well as to men of more 
than ordinary physical endurance. We have all seen going ovit 
from our own respective neighborhoods, not a few hardy, honest, 
industrious, patriotic young men, 

" Bearing their birthrights proudly on their backs, 
To make a hazard of new fortunes there ; " 

and, in their name. Sir, I protest against the Constitution which 
they have adopted being condemned on any score of its paternity. 

Is it said, finally, Mr. Chairman, as a ground for rejecting 
California, that she has prohibited slavery in her Constitution ? 
No, no. Sir ; nobody will venture to urge that as an objection 
to her admission into the American Union. Even those who 
would willingly have had it otherwise, must be glad in their own 
hearts, whether they confess it or not, that she has settled that 
question for herself ; that she has saved us from the difficulties 
and dangers which would have attended an attempt to settle it 
for her here. While some of us will go still further, and, with- 
out intending any offence to others, will thank God openly, that 
this infant Hercules of the West has strangled the serpents in 
the cradle ; that this youthful giant of the Pacific presents him- 
self to us self-dedicated to freedom ; and stands a self-pledged 
and self-posted sentinel — side by side with Oregon — against 
the introduction of slavery, by sea or by land, into any part of 
that trans- Alpine territory ! Had it been otherwise. Sir, and 
had the soil and climate proved in any degree favorable, who can 
tell what renewal of the horrors of the middle passage might 
have been witnessed, in transporting slaves under the American 
flag into regions so remote and difficult of access ! 

" But what is to become of our equilibrium?" says an hono- 
rable friend from South Carolina or Alabama. " What security 
are the Southern States to have against the growing preponde- 
rance of Northern power." 

Mr. Chairman, half the troubles which have convulsed the old 
world for two centuries past, have grown out of an imagined 
necessity of preserving the balance of power, or maintaining 
what is now denominated a sectional equilibrium. And so it 
will be here. The very idea of this equilibrium is founded on 



AND THE ADJUSTMENT OF THE SLAVERY QUESTION. G79 

views of sectional jealousy, sectional fear, sectional hostility and 
hate. It presupposes an encroaching and oppressive spirit on 
one side or the other, wliich waits only for the power and the 
opportunity to make itself felt; and, depend upon it. Sir, it will 
produce the very state of things which it supposes. But no 
such state of things exists now. 

Nothing, certainly, can be more unfounded than the idea, that 
the North has any hostility to the South ; or that Northern men, 
as a class, are desirous of injuring, or even of irritating, their 
Southern brethren. They know that the interests of all parts of 
the country are bound .up together in the same bundle of life or 
death, for the same good or evil destiny, and that no one mem- 
ber of the Confederacy can suffer without the whole body 
suffering with it. " Uifium et commune periclum : una salusP 
They desire — from a mere selfish interest of their own, if you 
will have it so — the prosperity and welfare of the Southern 
States, and rejoice at every indication of their increasing wealth 
and power. They believe, indeed, that the worst enemy of 
these States, is that which they cherish so jealously and so 
passionately within their own bosom. They believe slavery to 
have originated in a monstrous wrong. They believe its continu- 
ance to be a great evil. They are, undoubtedly, of opinion, that 
in this day of civilization and Christianity, it would well become 
those who are responsible for its continuance, to be looking 
about at least for some prospective and gi-adual system, by which 
at some far distant, if not at some earlier day, it may be brought 
to an end. They are ready, as I believe, to bear their share of 
the cost and sacrifice of any such system. But they know 
that they themselves have no power over the subject. They 
acknowledge, that so far as slavery in the States is concerned, 
they possess no constitutional right to interfere with it in any 
way whatever. If there be any thing upon which the whole 
North is united, and in which men of all parties, of all profes- 
sions, of all conditions, agree, it is in recognizing, in clear and 
unmistakable characters, as to slavery within the States, a con- 
stitutional prohibition of interference. 

But, JNIr. Chairman, this idea that a free State is never to be 
admitted to the Union without a slave State to match it, is, in 



680 THE ADMISSION OF CALIFORNIA 

my judgment, as impracticable as it is unjustifiable. "We shall 
have to enter upon a fresh career of annexation and conqaest to 
carry it out, — if it is to be carried out at all. When Texas 
shall have been exhausted by the admission of the two or three 
more slave States, which it has been so strongly contended that 
we have already stipulated to admit, you will have to go farther 
and farther South to find fresh material to manufacture slave 
States out of, for the sake of equilibrium. 

Walter Scott, in one of his inimitable essays, under the sobri- 
quet of Malachi Malagrowther, tells us of a castle of the olden 
time, the steward of which had such a passion for regularity, 
that when a poacher, or a rogue of any sort, was caught and put 
in the pillory on one side of the gate, he gave half a crown to 
an honest laborer to stand in the other pillory opposite to him I 
This, Sir, was all for uniformity's sake, and to preserve the equi- 
librium. And we shall have to adopt a similar course, if this 
idea of equilibrium is to be adopted ; we shall be called on 
systematically to plant slavery upon free soil, if not to put 
manacles upon free men, for uniformity's sake. 

Sir, you did not wait for a free State to come in hand-in-hand 
with Texas. You regarded no principles of equilibrium or 
uniformity on that occasion. You brought her in to disturb the 
equilibrium then existing, and to secure for the South a pre- 
ponderance in at least one branch of the Government. And 
with this example in our immediate view, the North, the free 
States, cannot but feel aggrieved, if the admission of California 
is to be made in any degree dependent upon considerations of 
this sort. We do not say that she has an absolute right to be 
admitted to-day or to-morrow. But we do say, that a rejection 
or a postponement of her admission, on mere grounds of sec- 
tional equilibrium, would be an offence without either provoca- 
tion or justification. 

And now. Sir, entertaining such views, I need hardly add that, 
in my judgment, California ought to be admitted to the Union 
without more delay, as a separate, independent measure. I am 
opposed to any scheme for qualifying or coupling it with other 
arrangements. I am opposed to all omnibus bills, and all amal- 
gamation projects. It is unjust to California to embarrass, and 



AND THE ADJUSTMENT OF THE SLAVERY QUESTION. G81 

perhaps peril, her admission, by mixing her up with matters of a 
controverted character. It is still more iinjnst to a large majority 
of this House, who desire to record their names distinctly for her 
admission as a State, to deny them the proper, legitimate, parlia- 
mentary mode of doing so, by annexing to the same bill pro- 
visions against which not a few of them are solemnly pledged. 
What would Southern gentlemen say, if we were wantonly to 
insist on inserting a Wilmot proviso in the California bill? Let 
them forbear to teach us bloody instructions, which may return 
to plague the inventor. The ingredients of the poisoned chalice 
may yet be commended to their own lips. Let them remember, 
that there may be a point of honor at the North as well as at 
the South. Let them remember, that the same voice of patriot- 
ism which cries to the North " give up," says to the South also 
" keep not back." Let them reflect, how far it is generous 
towards those Northern members who have consented thus far 
to waive any struggle for the proviso, to drive them to the odious 
alternative of rejecting what they desire to adopt, or of adopting 
what they may feel constrained to reject. 

And now, Sir, turning from California, what remains ? New 
Mexico and Utah. And what are we to do with them? 
Nothing, nothing, I reply, which shall endanger the harmony 
and domestic peace of these United States. 

Undoubtedly, Mi'. Chairmafn, my own honest impulse and 
earnest disposition would be to organize territorial governments 
over both of them, and to ingraft upon those governments the 
principles of the ordinance of 17S7. If I were consulting only 
my own feelings, or what I believe to be the wishes and views 
of the people of New England, this would be my unhesitating 
course. Though believing, as I do, that the laws of Mexico, 
abolishing slavery, are still in force there, I would yet make 
assurance doubly sure, and take a bond of fate, against the intro- 
duction of slavery into any territory where it does not already 
exist. 

But, Sir, I am not for overturning the government of my 
country, or for running any risk of so disastrous a result, in 
order to accomplish this object in the precise mode which would 
be most satisfactory to myself. No, Sir; nor would I press 



682 THE ADMISSION OF CALIFORNIA 

such a course pertinaciously upon Congress, even although the 
consequences should be nothing more serious than to plant a 
sting in the bosoms of the people of the South, or to leave an 
impression in their minds that they had been wronged and 
humiliated by the government of their own country. 

I hold to the entire equality of all the citizens of this Repub- 
lic, and of all the States of this Union. And while I wholly 
deny that the course which I have suggested would in any 
degree infringe upon this equality, while I can by no means 
admit that a prohibition of slavery in the territories w^ould 
encroach a hair's breadth upon the just rights of the Southern 
States or the Southern people, I would yet willingly and gladly 
forbear from any unnecessary act, which could even give color to 
such an idea. So far as my own sense of duty will allow me 
to go, or to forbear from going, it shall never be my fault, if 
any human being in this wade-spread Republic shall even ima- 
gine that he has been injured or assailed either in his person, 
his property, or his feelings. 

What, then, am I ready to do ? Sir, I have already expressed 
my intention to stand by the President's plan on this subject ; 
and nothing has since occurred to change that intention. I 
have heard this plan stigmatized as a weak and contemptible 
plan ; but I believe it to be a wise and patriotic plan, and one 
which, whether it succeeds or fails, will have entitled the Presi- 
dent to the unmingled respect and gratitude of the American 
people. 

My honorable friend from New York (Mr. Duer) has antici- 
pated me in most of the views which I had intended to take of 
this plan, and I should only weaken their impression by pre- 
senting them over again. But I cannot forbear dwelling for a 
moment upon a single consideration connected with it. 

The President, in his annual message, after stating his belief 
that " the people of New Mexico would, at no very distant day, 
present themselves for admission into the Union," says as fol- 
lows : 

" By awaiting their action, all causes of uneasiness may be avoided, and confidence 
and kind feeling preserved. With a view of maintaining the harmony and tranquillity 
so dear to all, we should abstaia from the introduction of those exciting topics of a 



AND THE ADJUSTMENT OF THE SLAVERY QUESTION. GSo 

sectional character which have hitherto produced painful apprehensions in the puhlic 
mind ; and I repeat the solemn warning of the first and most illustrious of my prede- 
cessors against furnishing ' any ground for characterizing parties hy geographical dis- 
criminations.' " 

Again, in his message of January 21, communicating his 
views in more detail upon the subject before us, he says : 

" No material inconvenience will result from the want, for a short period, of a 
government estahlished by Congress over that part of the territory which lies east- 
ward of the new State of California ; and the reasons for my opinion, that New Mex- 
ico will at no very distant period ask for admission into the Union, are founded on 
unofficial information, which I suppose is common to all who have cared to make 
inquiries on that subject. 

" Seeing, then, that the question Avhich now excites such painful sensations in the 
country, will in the end certainly be settled by the silent effect of causes independent 
of the action of Congress, I again submit to your wisdom the policy recommended in 
my annual message, of awaiting the salutary operation of those causes, believing that 
we shall thus avoid the creation of geographical parties, and secure the harmony of 
feeling so necessary to the beneficial action of our political system." 

This, Sir, is the great beauty, the crowning grace of the Presi- 
dent's proposition. His is, in my judgment, the only plan which 
gives a triumph to neither side of this controversy, and to 
neither section of the Union, and which, thus, leaves no just 
pretence for the formation of geographical parties. 

The passage of what has been called the Wilmot proviso 
would, we all understand, under present circumstances, unite 
the South as one man, and if it did not actually rend the Union 
asunder, would create an alienation and aversion in that quarter 
of the country, which would render the Union hardly worth pre- 
serving. 

On the other hand, Sir, I cannot suppress my apprehensions, 
that the organization of territorial governments by Congress 
without any anti-slavery clause, would only transfer the agita- 
tion and indignation to the other end of the Republic, and 
would tend freshly to inflame a spirit which we all desire, and 
which Southern men, especially, cannot fail to desire, to see for- 
ever extinguished. 

Mr. Chairman, there must be something of reciprocity in any 
arrangement by which this question is to be settled. But I can 
see none, none whatever, in the plan of admitting California, 
organizing the two territories without condition, and settling the 



G8-1 THE ADMISSION OF CALIFORNIA 

boundaries of Texas, as proposed in the same bill. What con- 
cession does the South make in such an arrangement? The 
admission of California? I cannot admit that there is any con- 
cession in that. If there be any objections to the admission of 
California, they are national and not sectional in their character, 
arising out of irregularities in her preparatory proceedings, and 
not out of the substantial provisions of her Constitution. And 
yet, in consideration of this admission, the North is called on 
not merely to waive any anti-slavery action in regard to two 
territories, but to sanction, as I understand it, the positive intro- 
duction of slavery where the South itself has already prohibited 
it. By the resolutions of annexation, all of Texas above 36*^ 
30' is to be free soil ; but, by this plan, we are to purchase all 
this, and unite it to New Mexico, and then abrogate the prohi- 
bition ! 

Sir, the true ground for conciliation is the middle ground, on 
which both sides can meet without the abandonment of any 
principle, or the sacrifice of any point of honor. Such, in my 
judgment, is the ground upon which the President has planted 
himself; and I cannot hesitate to express my belief, that if party 
feelings had never entered into this question ; if these pernicious 
and poisonous elements could have been eliminated from the 
controversy in which we are engaged, the great mass of the 
American people, from the South and from the North, from the 
West and from the East, would have been found rallying round 
the Executive upon this precise ground, and settling all their 
differences in harmony and concord. 

Tell me not that New Mexico and Utah may be left a little 
while longer without a government by such a course. Better 
that they should go without a government forever, than that our 
own Government should be broken up ! Better that they should 
be sundered from us eternally, than that they should be instru- 
mental in sundering us from each other! But no such alterna- 
tive is involved in this policy. The people who occupy those 
territories are capable of self-government, and no sooner shall 
we have finally announced to them this policy, than they will 
follow the example of California, and relieve us of all further 
responsibility. 



AND THE ADJUSTMENT OP THE SLAVERY QUESTION. 685 

It has been suggested in some quarters that the President has 
changed his position, and deserted his original platform. This is 
not the first time, Sir, that such a charge has been brought against 
General Taylor. The Mexicans proclaimed that he had changed 
his plan, and deserted his post, and fled from the defence of his 
friends, when he made that masterly and matchless movement 
from Fort Brown to Point Isabel. But they discovered their 
error before many days were over, and found, to their cost, that 
they had mistaken their man. I have not the slightest authority 
to speak for the President, nor would it be parliamentary for me 
to do so, if I had ; but I am strongly inclined to the belief, that 
those who imagine that he either has changed, or means to 
change, his views on this subject, will be equally disappointed. 

For myself, Sir, I can truly say that I adopt this plan in a 
spirit of conciliation and concession, regarding it as a compro- 
mise worthy of a Southern President to offer, and worthy of both 
the Southern and the Northern people to accept. 

I know that there have been many reproaches and criminations 
dealt out against some of us by the ultraists of the free States, 
for being willing to make even this compromise. Because we 
are not quite so clamorous and rampant in regard to the anti- 
slavery proviso as some of its peculiar friends, we are charged 
with inconsistency, desertion, and treachery. Now, Sir, I am 
one of those who think that Northern men can afford to be a 
little forbearing upon this subject, without incurring any just 
liability to such imputations. I am of opinion that there is 
ample reason to be found in the changed condition of public 
affairs, in the altered circumstances of the case, for the evident 
relaxation of the Northern sentiment on the subject of this pro- 
viso, and for the manifest willingness of the Northern mind to 
acquiesce in what has been called the non-action policy of the 
President. 

Why, Sir, at the time that proviso was originally proposed, 
at the time it was made the subject of such ardent protestations 
of uncompromising devotion, what was the state of the country 
and of the question ? "We were then at war with Mexico, and 
with the strongest reason to apprehend that this war was to 
be pressed even to the extinction and absorption of the whole 

58 



G86 THE ADMISSION OF CALIFORNIA 

Mexican Republic. A vast, undefined extension of territory was 
thus in prospect, upon which slavery was, or was not, to be 
planted and established. That war, thank Heaven, has been 
brought to a close. We are now at peace ; and what is more^ 
the treaty of peace has been so arranged, and the boundary 
line so run, that though we may hesitate to admit that Nature 
has everywhere settled the question against slavery, we must, 
yet, all perceive and acknowledge that the territory which has 
been acquired holds out but little comparative temptation or 
inducement to its introduction. 

What else has occurred? Why, Sir, at the time we all com- 
mitted ourselves so hotly to the support of the proviso, no govern- 
ment had yet been established in Oregon, and a purpose had 
been exhibited to insist upon the right of slavery to go there. 
Since then, the principles of the ordinance of 1787 have been 
extended, by solemn enactment, over that whole territory. 

What further have we, witnessed ? Why, Sir, California, 
California, a thousand-fold the most important and valuable 
part of the territories acquired from Mexico, has settled the ques- 
tion for herself, and spontaneously dedicated the treasures of her 
virgin soil, and the riches of her magnificent mines, to the labor 
of freemen forever! 

Now, I do not say that there is to be found in all this the slight- 
est justification for an abandonment of Northern principle. But 
is there not, is there not, ample reason for an abatement of the 
Northern tone, for a forbearance of Northern urgency, upon this 
subject, without the imputation of tergiversation and treachery? 

I think that I do not undervalue the importance of the 
great principles of the ordinance of 1787, and of that proviso 
which I prefer henceforth to associate with the great names of 
Thomas Jefferson, and Nathan Dane, and Rufus King, rather 
than with that of any public man of the present day, however 
distinguished or notorious he may have become. But I can 
never put the question of extending slave soil on the same foot- 
ing with one of directly increasing slavery and multiplying slaves. 
If a positive issue could ever again be made up for our decision, 
whether human beings, few or many, of whatever race, complex- 
ion, or condition, should be freshly subjected to a system of here- 



AND THE ADJUSTMENT OF THE SLAVERY QUESTION. G87 

ditary bondage, and be changed from freemen into slaves, I can 
conceive that no bonds of union, no ties of interest, no chords 
of sympathy, no considerations of past glory, present welfare, 
or future grandeur, would be suffered to interfere for an instant 
with our resolute and unceasing resistance to a measure so ini- 
quitous and abominable. There would be a clear, unquestion- 
able, moral element in such an issue, which would admit of no 
compromise, no concession, no forbearance whatever. We could 
never sanction such a policy ; we could never submit to it. A 
million of swords would leap from their scabbards to arrest it, 
and the Union itself would be shivered like a Prince Rupert's 
drop in the shock. 

But the question whether the institution of slavery, as it 
already exists, shall be permitted to extend itself over a hundred, 
or a hundred thousand, more square miles than it now occupies, 
is a very different question. The influences of such a policy upon 
the ultimate extinction of slavery, and upon the condition of its 
unfortunate victims as long as it lasts, may well be a subject for 
careful consideration. There may be two sides even to some of 
the moral aspects of the question. At any rate. Sir, it is not, in 
my judgment, such an issue, that conscientious and religious men 
may not be free to acquiesce in whatever decision may be 
arrived at by the constituted authorities of the country. 

For myself, Mr. Chairman, I can truly say, that it is not with 
a view of cooping up slavery, as it has been termed, within 
limits too narrow for its natural growth ; that it is not for the 
purpose of girding it round with lines of fire till its sting, like 
that of the scorpion, shall be turned upon itself; that it is not 
for the sake of subjecting it to a sort of experimentiini crucis ; 
that I, for one, have ever advocated the principles of the ordi- 
nance of 1787. Nor have I the slightest imagination that such 
would be the result of enforcing those principles, within any 
estimable period of time. 

Why, are you aware. Sir, do Southern gentlemen remember, 
that what are called the slave States of this Union, Texas to the 
Rio Grande being included, contain about nine hundred and 
forty thousand square miles of territory, with a white population, 
by the census of 1840, of considerably less than five millions of 



688 THE ADMISSION OF CALIFORNIA 

people ? Allow, if you please, that this population has increased, 
during the last ten years, sufficiently to bring up the whole exist- 
ing population, slaves included, to nine millions of people. You 
have then less than ten persons, black and white, bond and free, 
to a square mile of territory ! Is there not room enough here 
for every degree of expansion which can be predicted, upon the 
largest calculation, for a century to come ? 

Meantime, Sir, do not forget, that the free States, with a 
population, by the census of 1840, of more than nine millions 
and a half, and which must now have run up to not less than 
thirteen or fourteen millions, have only about four hundred and 
fifty thousand square miles. In other words, the free States, at 
this moment, have thirty persons to a square mile, while the 
slave States have only ten ! 

I exclude all the territories in this calculation. But it is a 
striking fact, that if all the territories, without exception, not 
included within the limits of any State, were added to the free 
States, and a proportion were then instituted between the num- 
ber of square miles occupied by the free white population of the 
two classes of States, it would be found that the slave States 
would fall but little short of their full share. And this, Sir, with- 
out making any allowance for the uninhabitable deserts and 
frozen wastes and mountains of rock and ice, by which these 
territories are so greatly curtailed in their dimensions, so far as 
any practical purposes of occupation or enjoyment are con- 
cerned. 

I repeat, then, Mr. Chairman, it is not with the vain idea of 
crowding slavery out of existence, that I adhere to the principles 
of the ordinance of 1787. 

Nor is it. Sir, upon any consideration of local power, or with 
any view of securing a sectional preponderance. For one, I see 
in the Constitution of the United States an ample security 
against any real aggression which either section of the Union 
could be tempted to commit against the other. And even if it 
were not so, there is a peculiar tie of common interest among 
the slave States, growing out of this very institution of slavery, 
which always has made them, and always will make them, a 
full match for any number of free States which may be included 



AND THE ADJUSTJIENT OP THE SLAVERY QUESTION. G89 

within the limits of this Union, In our local competitions and 
party difTerences, they will find ample room for the exercise of a 
controlling influence. I am not sure that it is not their destiny 
always to hold the balance of power among States and between 
parties, and thus to be able to adopt the proud motto, — prccest 
cui adhosreo, — which may be liberally interpreted " he shall be 
President, to whom I adhere ! " 

Sir, the territories which have come under our guardianship 
are, in my judgment, of more worth than to be made the mere 
make-weights in the scales of sectional equality. They are 
entitled to another sort of consideration, than to be cut up and 
partitioned off, like down-trodden Poland, in order to satisfy the 
longings, and appease the jealousies, of surrounding States. 
They are — they ought certainly — to be disposed of and regu- 
lated by us, with a primary regard to the prosperity and welfare 
of those who occupy them now, and of those who are destined to 
occupy them hereafter, and not with the selfish view of augment- 
ing the mere local power or pride of any of us. 

Mr. Chairman, I see in the territorial possessions of this 
Union, the seats of new States, the cradles of new Common- 
wealths, the nurseries, it may be, of new Republican empires. I 
see, in them, the future 'abodes of our brethren, our children, and 
our children's children, for a thousand generations. I see, grow- 
ing up within their borders, institutions upon which the charac- 
ter and condition of a vast multitude of the American family, 
and of the human race, in all time to come, are to depend. I 
feel, that for the original shaping and moulding of these institu- 
tions, you and I, and each one of us "Who occupy these seats, are 
in part responsible. And I cannot omit to ask myself, what 
shall I do, that I may deserve the gratitude and the blessing, and 
not the condemnation and the curse, of that posterity, whose 
welfare is thus in some degree committed to my care ? 

As I pursue this inquiry. Sir, I look back instinctively to the 
day, now more than two hundred years ago, when the Atlantic 
coast was the scene of events like those now in progress upon 
the Pacific ; when incited, not, indeed, by a love of gold, but 
by a devotion to that which is better than gold, and whose price 
is above rubies, the forefathers of New England were pltmting 

58* 



690 THE ADMISSION OF CALIFORNIA 

their little colony upon that rock -bound shore. I look back to 
the day when slavery existed nowhere upon the American con- 
tinent, and before that first Dutch ship, " built in the eclipse, and 
rigged with curses dark," had made its way to Jamestown, with 
a cargo of human beings in bondage. I reflect how much our 
fathers would have exulted, could they have arrested the pro- 
gress of that ill-starred vessel, and of all others of kindred 
employment. I remember how earnestly the. patriots of Virgi- 
nia and South Carolina again and again pleaded and protested 
against the policy of Great Britain in forcing slaves upon them 
against their will. I recall the original language of the Declara- 
tion of Independence itself, as first drafted by Thomas Jefferson, 
assigning it as one of the moving causes for throwing off" our 
allegiance to the British monarch, that " he had waged cruel war 
against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of 
life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never 
offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in 
another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their trans- 
portation thither ; " and that, " determined to keep open a 
market where men should be bought and sold, he had prostitu- 
ted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to 
prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce." 

I remember, too, that whatever material advantages may have 
since been derived from slave labor, in the cultivation of a crop 
which w^as then unknown to our country, the moral character 
and social influences of the institution are still precisely what 
they were described to be, by those who understood them best, 
in the earlier days of the Republic. And I see, too, as no man 
can help seeing, that almost all the internal dangers and domes- 
tic dissensions which cast a doubt, or a shadow of doubt, upon 
the perpetuity of our glorious Union, have been, and still are, 
the direct or indirect consequences of the existence of this insti- 
tution. And thus seeing, thus remembering, thus reflecting, how 
can I do otherwise than resolve, that it shall be by no vote of 
mine, that slavery shall be established in any territory where it 
does not already exist ? 

These, Mr. Chairman, are the considerations which influence 
and control my action on the questions before us. I do not ask, 



AND THE ADJUSTMENT OF THE SLAVERY QUESTION. G91 

what the Northern States, or what the Southern States, might 
find most agi'eeable to their feelings, or most advantageous to 
their interests. I ask only, — what is right, what is just, what is 
best, for the permanent welfare of the people of those future 
commonwealths, whose foundations are now about to be laid, 
and whose destinies are now about to be determined ? And all 
my observation, all my experience, all the convictions of my 
mind and of my heart, unite in replying to this question, that 
slavery is not only an injustice and a wrong to those who are 
under its immediate yoke, but that it is an evil and an injury to 
the highest social, moral, and political interests of any State in 
which it exists. 

Here, then. Sir, I bring these remarks to a close. I have ex- 
plained, to the best of my ability, the views which I entertain 
of the great questions of the day. Those views may be mis- 
represented hereafter, as they have been heretofore; but they 
cannot be misunderstood by any one who desires, or who i^ even 
willing, to understand them. Most gladly would I have found 
myself agreeing more entirely with some of the friends whom I 
see around me, and with more than one of those elsewhere, with 
whom I have always been proud to be associated, and whose 
lead, on almost all occasions, I have rejoiced to follow. 

One tie, however, I am persuaded, still remains to us all — a 
common devotion to the Union of these States, and a common 
determination to sacrifice every thing but principle to its preser- 
vation. Our responsibilities are indeed great. This vast Re- 
public, stretching from sea to sea, and rapidly outgrowing every 
thing but our affections, looks anxiously to us, this day, to take 
care that it receives no detriment. Nor is it too much to say, 
that the eyes and the hearts of the friends of constitutional free- 
dom throughout the world, are at this moment turned eagerly 
here — more eagerly than ever before — to behold an example of 
successful republican institutions, and to see them come out 
safely and triumphantly from the fiery trial to which they are 
now subjected ! 

I have the firmest faith that these eyes and these hearts will 
not be disappointed. I have the strongest belief that the visions 
and phantoms of disunion which now appall us, will soon be 



692 • THE ADMISSION OF CALIFORNIA, ETC. 

remembered only like the clouds of some April morning, or " the 
dissolving views " of some evening spectacle. I have the fullest 
conviction that this glorious Republic is destined to outlast all, 
all, at either end of the Union, who may be plotting against its 
peace, or predicting its downfall. 

" Fond, impious man! tliink'st thou, yon sanguine cloud, 
Rais'd by thy breath, has quench'd the orb of day 1 
To-morrow, he repairs the golden flood. 
And warms the nations with redoubled ray ! " 

Let us proceed in the settlement of the unfortunate contro- 
versies in which we find ourselves involved in a spirit of mutual 
conciliation and concession. Let us invoke fervently upon our 
efforts the blessing of that Almighty Being who is " the author 
of peace and the lover of concord." And we shall still find 
order springing out of confusion, harmony evoked from discord, 
and Peace, Union, and Liberty, once more reassured to our land I 



THE DEATH OF PRESIDENT TAYLOE. 



A SPEECH DELIVERED IX THE HOUSE OF REPKESEXTATIVES OF THE UXITED 
STATES, OX THE AXXOUNCEJIEXT OF THE DEATH OF GEXERAL TAYLOK, 
JULY 10, JS50. 



It would not be easily excused, Mr, Speaker, by those whom 
I represent in this Hall, if there were no Massachusetts voice to 
respond to the eulogy which has been pronounced by Louisiana 
upon her illustrious and lamented son. Indeed, neither my per- 
sonal feelings nor my political relations, either to the living or to 
the dead, would permit me to remain altogether silent on this 
occasion. And yet. Sir, I confess, I know not how to say any 
thing satisfactory to myself, or suitable to the circumstances of 
the hour. 

The event which has just been officially announced, has come 
upon us so suddenly — has so overwhelmed us with mingled 
emotions of surprise and sadness — that all ordinary forms of 
expression seem to lose their significance, and one would fain 
bow his head to the blow in silence, until its first shock has in 
some degree passed away. 

Certainly, Sir, no one can fail to realize that a most moment- 
ous and mysterious Providence has been manifested in our 
midst. At a moment when, more than almost ever before in 
our history, the destinies of our country seemed, to all human 
sight, to be inseparably associated with the character and con- 
duct of its Chief Executive Magistrate, that Magistrate has been 
summoned from his post, by the only messenger whose man- 
dates he might not have defied, and has been withdrawn forever 
from the sphere of human existence I 



694 THE DEATH OF PRESIDENT TAYLOR. 

There are those of us, I need not say, Sir, who had looked to 
him with affection and reverence as our chosen leader and guide 
in the difficulties and perplexities by which we are surrounded. 
There are those of us, who had relied confidently on him, as 
upon no other man, to uphold the Constitution and maintain the 
Union of the country in that future, upon which " shadows, clouds 
and darkness " may well be said to rest. And, as we now 
behold him, borne away by the hand of God from our sight, in 
the very hour of peril, we can hardly repress the exclamation, 
which was applied to the departing prophet of old: "My father, 
my father I the chariot of Israel and the horsemen thereof." 

Let me not even seem to imply, however, that the death of 
General Taylor is any thing less than a national loss. There 
may be, and we know there is, in this event, a privileged and 
preeminent grief for his immediate family and relatives, to which 
we can only offer the assurance of our heartfelt sympathy. There 
is, too, a peculiar sorrow for his political friends and supporters, 
which we would not affect to conceal. But the whole people of 
the United States will feel, and will bear witness, when they 
receive these melancholy tidings, that they have all been called 
to sustain a most afHicting national bereavement. 

I hazard nothing. Sir, in saying, that the roll of our Chief 
Magistrates, since 1789, illustrious as it is, presents the name of 
no man who has enjoyed a higher reputation with his contem- 
poraries, or who will enjoy a higher reputation with posterity, 
than Zachary Taylor, for some of the best and noblest qualities 
which adorn our nature. 

His indomitable courage, his unimpeachable honesty, his 
Spartan simplicity and sagacity, his frankness, kindness, mode- 
ration, and magnanimity, his fidelity to his friends, his generosity 
and humanity to his enemies, the purity of his private life, the 
patriotism of his public principles, will never cease to be che- 
rished in the grateful remembrance of all just men and all true- 
hearted Americans. 

As a Soldier and a General, his fame is associated with some 
of the proudest and most thrilling scenes of our military history. 
He may be literally said to have conquered every enemy he has 
met, save only that last enemy, to which we must all, in turn, 
surrender. 



THE DEATH OF PRESIDENT TAYLOR. G95 

As a Civilian and Statesman, during the brief period in which 
he has been permitted to enjoy the transcendent honors which a 
grateful country had awarded him, he has given proof of a devo- 
tion to duty, of an attachment to the Constitution and the 
Union, of a patriotic determination to maintain the peace of 
our country, which no trials or temptations could shake. He 
has borne his faculties meekly, but firmly. He has been " clear 
in his great office." He has known no local partialities or pre- 
judices, but has proved himself capable of embracing his whole 
country, in the comprehensive affections and regards of a large 
and generous heart. 

But he has fallen almost at the threshold of his civil career, 
and at a moment when some of us were looking to him to ren- 
der services to the country, which we had thought no other man 
could perform. Certainly, Sir, he has died too soon for every 
body but himself. We can hardly find it in our hearts to repine 
that the good old man has gone to his rest. We would not 
disturb the repose in which the brave old soldier sleeps. His 
part in life had been long and faithfully performed. In his own 
last words, " he had always done his duty, and he was not afraid 
to die." But our regrets for ourselves and for our country are 
deep, strong, and unfeigned. " He should have died hereafter." 
Sir, it was a fit and beautiful circumstance in the close of 
such a career, that his last official appearance was at the 
celebration of the birthday of our National Independence, and 
more especially, that his last public act was an act of homage 
to the memory of him, whose example he had ever revered and 
followed, and who, as he himself so well said, "was, by so many 
titles, the Father of his Country." 

And now, Mr. Speaker, let us hope that this event may teach 
us all how vain is our reliance upon any arm of flesh. Let us 
hope that it may impress us with a solemn sense of our national 
as well as individual dependence on a higher than human Power/ 
Let us remember that " the Lord is king, be the people never so 
impatient ; that He sitteth between the cherubim, be the earth 
never so unquiet." Let us, in language which is now hallowed 
to us all, as having been the closing and crowning sentiment of 
the brief but admirable Inaugural Address with which this illus- 



G96 THE DEATH OF PRESIDENT TAYLOR. 

trions Patriot opened his Presidential term, and which it is my 
privilege to read at this moment from the very copy from which 
it was originally read by himself to the American people, on 
the 4th day of March, 1849, — " Let us," in language in which 
" he, being dead, yet speaketh " — " let us invoke a continuance 
of the same Protecting Care which has led us from small begin- 
nings to the eminence we this day occupy ; and let us seek to 
deserve that continuance by prudence and moderation in our 
councils ; by well-directed attempts to assuage the bitterness 
which too often marks unavoidable differences of opinion ; by 
the promulgation and practice of just and liberal principles ; 
and by an enlarged patriotism, which shall acknowledge no 
limits but those of our own wide-spread Republic." 



THE DEATH OF DANIEL P. KING. 



REMARKS MADE IX THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES OV THE UXITED 
STATES, OU THE ANXOUXCEME.CT OF THE DEATH OF Mlt. KING, A 
REPRESENTATIVE FROM MASSACHUSETTS, JULY 27,1850. 



If mere custom had prevailed on this occasion, Mr. Speaker, 
it would liave fallen to mc, as the senior member of the Massa- 
chusetts Delegation in this Hall, to perform the sad duty, VvMiich 
has been so faithfully and feelingly discharged by my friend and 
colleague, (Hon. Julius Hockv.'ell,) v.^ho has just taken his seat. 
I trust, therefore, that I may be allowed to say, that, in yielding, 
as I readily have done, to the claims of a more intimate associa- 
tion and immediate companionship Vv^ith the excellent person 
whose death has been announced to us, I have not been wanting 
in the deepest regret for his loss, or in the most sincere respect 
for his memory. 

It has been my good fortune to be connected Vv^ith Mr. King 
for many years in the Legislature of our own Commonv/ealth, 
as well as to be with him here, during the whole period of his 
seven years' service as a member of this House ; and I can truly 
say, that I have seldom met with a more just and worthy man, 
or with one more scrupulously faithful to every obligation to his 
neighbor, his country, and his God. 

His devotion as a public servant, his integrity as a private 
citizen, and the high moral and religious character which he. 
sustained in all the relations of life, had endeared him not 
merely to his immediate constituents, but to the whole people of 
Massachusetts ; and there is no one who was more likely to 
have received at their hands, at no distant day, the reward of an 
honorable ambition, in the highest honors of his native State. 

59 



698 THE DEATH OF DANIEL P. KING. 

Though he had enjoyed the advantage of an education, which 
would have fitted him for entering upon either of what are com- 
monly called the learned professions, his tastes had led him to 
agricultural pursuits. He prided himself, as any one may well 
pride himself, on being a good farmer ; and the farmers of his 
neighborhood were justly proud of him, as one of the most intel- 
ligent, observing, and scientific of their number. 

We may well count it. Sir, among the consolations of this 
hour, that he was permitted by a kind Providence, after so long 
a detention amid these scenes of strife, to revisit his native fields, 
to die under his own roof, surrounded by his family and friends, 
and to lie down at last beneath the soil which he had adorned 
with his hand, and which was so dear to his heart. 

In the beautiful village in which he lived, and which is now 
the scene of so much unaffected sorrow for his loss, I venture to 
say that no sod will be kept greener than that which covers his 
ashes, and that his name will long be sadly but fondly associa- 
ted with the " Flower of Essex." 



TV 



TO THE PEOPLE OE BOSTOX. 

LETTER OF ACKNOWLEDGMEXT TO THE PEOPLE OF BOSTOX OX RETIRING 
FROM THEIR SERVICE, JULY CO, 1850. 



Fellow-Citizexs, — 

Having this day accepted the commission, with which I have 
been honored by the Executive of the Commonwealth, to supply 
the vacancy in the Senate of the United States, created by the 
appointment of the Honorable Daniel Webster to the office o^ 
Secretary of State, my relations to you, as your immediate Repre- 
sentative in Congress, are dissolved. 

I cannot allow the occasion to pass, without expressing to you 
all, the deep sense which I entertain of the kindness and confi- 
dence which you have manifested towards me, during the whole 
period of my public career. 

It is nearly sixteen years since I entered your service as one 
of your representatives in the State Legislature, and nearly ten 
years have now elapsed, since I was transferred as your sole 
representative to the National Councils. 

I should be ungrateful indeed, were I to return no word of 
acknowledgment for the generous continuance of your favor 
and regard, which I have experienced during so long a service. 

The appointment with which the Governor and Council of 
Massachusetts have now honored me above my deserts, has only 
anticipated by a few months the time when our relations were 
to end, — as my intention to retire from the House of Repre- 
sentatives had been openly declared, and was unalterably fixed. 

Indeed, it was my earnest wish, as many of you are aware, 
to withdraw my name from the candidacy, at the close of the last 
Congressional term. Having then already represented the Bos- 



700 TO THE PEOPLE OF BOSTON. 

ton District longer than any one of my predecessors since the 
organization of the Federal Government, and having enjoyed 
the highest honors, and, I may add, the heaviest labors . of the 
House of which I was a member, it was my sincere desire and 
purpose to decline another election. But my design was over- 
ruled, for reasons of which I did not feel at Ubcrty to deny the 
force, and by those to whose judgment and authority I was bound 
to defer. 

In retiring now, fellow-citizens, from your immediate service, 
I will enter into no formal account of my stewardship, nor detain 
you with any discussion of the existing state of public affairs. 
Other opportunities for such topics may occur hereafter. 

I desire only to assure you, that I shall bear with me to other 
scenes of duty, the proudest and most grateful recollection of 
the constant indulgence and support which I have received at 
your hands ; and that I shall never cease to cherish, whether in 
pubUc or private life, the most cordial wishes for the prosperity 
and welfare of my native city, and for the health and happiness 
of all its inhabitants. 

Robert C. Winthrop. 

Washington, 30th July, 1850. 



THE 

BOUNDAEY OF NEW 3IEXIC0 AND TEXAS. 



KEJIAKKS IX THE SEXATE OF THE UXITED STATES, OX THE UILL FOU 
ORG.IXIZIXG A TERRITORIAL GOVERXMEXT IX XEW MEXICO, AUGUST, 

14, 1850. 



Mr. President, — 

The Senator from Ohio, (Mr. Chase,) has now for the second 
time indulged in a com-se of remark on this subject, which, reluc- 
tant as I am to trouble the Senate, I cannot allow to pass without 
some notice. I understood him to say at the outset, and to 
repeat at the close of his remarks, that the main objection to the 
late compromise bill was the boundary line which it proposed to 
run between New Mexico and Texas, and the ten millions of 
dollars which it proposed to pay to the State of Texas for 
agreeing to that boundary line. 

Mr. Chase. The statement which I made was that the main objection to the series 
of measures proposed by the compromise bill was, as I understood it, the great conces- 
sion made to Texas of territory believed to belong to the United States ; or, to speak 
more accurately, it was the bargain proposed to be made between the United States 
and Texas in reference to their reciprocal cession of territory by which tlie United 
States were to pay ten millions. I did not say there were not other serious objections 
to that series of measures. There were other objections. But this was most urged ; 
it was most dwelt upon; it was most considered. The other principal objection to 
the bill was that it was a bill of incongruous elements. 

■ Mr. "Winthrop. Mr. President, I understood the Senator from 
Ohio pretty distinctly to imply, not merely that members of the 
Senate who had opposed the compromise bill mainly upon this 
ground, had now yielded to terms which were much less advan- 
tageous to the United States ; but that there was something in 
the fact of a recent change of Administration to which this con- 

59* 



702 THE BOUNDARY OF NEW MEXICO AND TEXAS. 

cession was to be attributed. Tlic Senator even now has hardly 
modified the idea which he then suggested. He certainly stated 
that one of the main objections to the compromise bill was the 
running of this boundary line and the appropriation of these ten 
millions of dollars. He also intimated, that owing to the influ- 
ence of some change of administration, gentlemen had been 
willing to assent to measures which they had previously opposed. 

Now, Sir, I had really imagined that the honorable Senator 
from Ohio would be one of the last Senators on this floor to 
assert, or even to intimate, that one of the main objections to 
the compromise bill was this adjustment of boundary between 
Texas and New Mexico. Certainly, I can conceive that Sena- 
tors should have objected to that boundary line, and to the con- 
sideration which it was proposed to pay for it, as an element in 
a bill of that mixed and composite character ; — a bill made up, 
as I think, of many incongruous ingredients, and into which this 
particular ingredient was liable to the suspicion, to say the least, 
of having been inserted, for the purpose of carrying through 
Congress measures which could not have been carried without 
it. So far, many of us may have objected to that element of 
the bill. 

But, Sir, the honorable Senator knows well, that on the part 
of his own State of Ohio, and on the part of the State which I 
have the honor to represent, the main objection to that bill, 
above all other considerations, and in comparison with which 
any mere matter of boundary or of bonus, of acres or of dol- 
lars, was but as the light dust of the balance, was found in the 
fact, that it undertook to establish governments for vast territo- 
rial possessions which had been acquired to the United States as 
free soil, without any restriction as to the admission of slavery. 
The honorable Senator knows that perfectly well. And he 
knows that upon that subject we have yielded nothing, and 
proposed to yield nothing, in the passage of this Texan boundary 
bill, but that, on the other hand, we have taken the first and 
most indispensable step towards securing the existence of a free 
State, or indeed of any State, on the Rio Grande. 

Mr. President, it required no change of administration to 
convince any of us, I think, of the absolute necessity of running 



THE BOUNDARY OP NEW MEXICO AND TEXAS. 703 

a boundary line of some sort between New Mexico and Texas. 
And that, Sir, not by the slow process of judicial adjustment, 
nor by the dilatory decision of a board of commissioners, as 
proposed by the honorable Senator from Maine, (Mr. Bradbury,) 
but by the prompt and immediate action of the Congress of the 
United States. You may call it timidity ; you may call it 
cowardice, if you will; but I confess to have believed that 
upon this question we were brought at last to the alternative of 
drawing the line, or of drawing the sword. I confess to have 
believed, that unless some measure of this sort were speedily 
adopted, we should not have a foot of free soil this side of the 
Rio Grande, without fighting for it. Now, Sir, for my own part, 
I had rather that this boundary between sister States should be 
run by gold than by steel ; by money than by blood ; and that it 
should be marked upon the map of our Union in all time to 
come, by any other lines rather than red lines. 

Sir, always from the beginning of the session, I believe that 
both my colleague and myself have agreed in the idea, that this 
boundary line must be settled as a separate and independent 
question, and that it was to be settled, if possible, by the Congress 
of the United States, upon fair and liberal terms towards Texas, 
— not in a spirit of unworthy concession, but in a spirit of just 
and liberal accommodation. And, when it shall be so settled, the 
only cloud which casts a serious shadow over the domestic peace 
of our country will, in my judgment, have disappeared. But 
how is it. Sir, with the precise boundary which the bill which 
has passed this body has proposed to run ? The Senator from 
Ohio has alluded to the line proposed by the Senator from 
Missouri, (Mr. Benton,) as one greatly preferable. I acknow- 
ledge that it is so, in many respects ; but how far was it a 
practicable line ? It will be remembered by the Senate that I 
offered that line myself, just before the Senate adjourned on the 
day before the bill was put on its final passage, and that I with- 
drew it the next morning. And why did I withdraw it ? Because 
I ascertained, on examination and inquiry, that the convention 
of New Mexico which framed that State constitution, which it 
is my earnest hope that Congress will one day or other acknow- 
ledge and ratify, had themselves cut off a large portion of the 



704 THE BOUNDARY OF NEW MEXICO AND TEXAS. 

territory included by that boundary line, and had put their own 
line at about the thirty-second degree of North Latitude. Thus 
the seventy thousand square miles, spoken of by the Senator from 
Missouri, around the sources of the river Puerco, had been 
abandoned by New Mexico herself. 

Mr. Benton (in his seat.) A part of it. 

Mr. Winthrop. A very large part of it, Sir. I doubt, under 
these circumstances, whether the Senator himself would have 
adhered to that part of his proposed line. Certainly he would 
not have done so, if his views, like my own, had been favorable 
to receiving New Mexico at once as a State. But what does 
the Senator from Missouri tell us this morning in regard to 
another part of this boundary question? He tells us. Sir, — and 
it is a most important fact to be taken in connection with the 
remarks of the Senator from Ohio — he tells us that the thirty 
thousand square miles of Northern territory which the line pro- 
posed by the Senator from Maryland (Mr. Pearce) left to Texas, 
and which his own bill would have secured to the United States, 
in his judgment belonged rightfully to Texas, and that he had 
proposed to purchase it outright with a part of those fifteen mil- 
lions of dollars which his bill appropriated. 

Mr. Benton, (in his seat.) Exactly. 

Mr. Winthrop. So that, instead of our ceding to Texas, in 
this quarter, territory which belonged to New Mexico, it is now 
upon record, from the lips of the distinguished Senator from 
Missouri, — upon whose testimony I would rather stake a ques- 
tion of geography than upon that of any other Senator in the 
chamber, — that these thirty thousand square miles, which the 
bill of the Senator from ]Maryland has left to Texas, were 
already the rightful property of Texas. 

Well, now, Mr. President, let me not be supposed to intimate 
that I am entirely satisfied with the boundary line which has 
been adopted. I desired a very different line, and I voted uni- 
formly for every one of the amendments which were offered with 
a view to improve it. Yet I must say that the advantages of 
that line have not been altogether appreciated, even by the 
honorable Senator from Maine. Why, Sir, where is the most 
valuable part of the territory in dispute between the United 



THE BOUNDARY OP NEW MEXICO AND TEXAS. 705 

States and Texas, — the most valuable for every purpose of a 
free and prosperous State ? Certainly, it is upon the bor- 
ders of the Hio Grande. It is upon the banks and alono- the 
sources of the Puerco. It is not upon the Llano cstacado. It 
is not upon those barren heaths and buflalo ranges which con- 
stitute the greater part of this northern territory which is to be 
left to Texas. Now, the boundary line proposed by the Senator 
from Maryland has secured to the future State of New Mexico 
a large strip of land, — I know not precisely how many square 
miles, but enough, I have reason to think, to make a State 
almost, if not quite, as large as the State of Massachusetts, — 
on the very borders of the Uio Grande, and in the immediate 
valley of the Puerco. 

Sir, this is not a question to be settled by any mere superficial 
measurement, by any mere calculation of acres or of square 
miles. It is the character, and not the extent, of the territory 
which is to be regarded. And, for one, I hold that this triangle 
of territory on the Rio Grande and the Puerco, which is now 
secured to New Mexico, and which the compromise bill would 
have given up to Texas, is worth the whole of the thirty thou- 
sand square miles, and of thirty thousand more added to them, 
upon that dreary and desolate plain, over which (as the Senator 
from IMissouri has told us) one can only jfind his way by means 
of the stakes which have been driven down into the soil, to take 
the place of those natural landmarks, which are to be found in 
abundance wherever land is fit for the occupation of man. 

But, after all, Mr. President, the real question before us is 
what is to become of New Mexico ? That is the question in- 
volved in the bill under consideration. Now, Sir, I do not pro- 
pose to detain the Senate, at this late hour of the day and of 
the session, by any formal speech on that subject. But, lest 
my votes should be misunderstood hereafter, 1 must state my 
opinions and purposes briefly but distinctly. During the short 
time in which I have had the honor of a seat in this body, I 
have been content with giving votes upon these great questions 
from day to day, with but little explanation. I have done so 
from a sincere reluctance to delay the action of the Senate. I 
had at any time rather " be checked for silence, than taxed for 



706 THE BOUNDARY OF NEW MEXICO AND TEXAS. 

speech." I have done so, liowever, the more readily, because I 
have ah-eady had an opportunity of expressing my views else- 
where. It so happened, Sir, that on the very day on which the 
compromise bill was introduced into this chamber, I was mak- 
ing a speech on the same subject in the other end of this Capi- 
tol. While the distinguished Senator from Kentucky (Mr. 
Clay) — who is not now among us, but who, w^e all hope, will 
soon return to his place reinvigorated by the ocean breezes of 
New England — was reading the report of the committee of 
Thirteen here, I was addressing the House there. I remember 
it the more strongly because that distinguished Senator, with 
the resistless fascination which belongs to him, had drawn off a 
large portion of the audience, which, under other circumstances, 
I might have reasonably expected, and had left me with quite 
too many empty seats, both on the floor and in the galleries, for 
the inspiration which is so necessary to success in an effort of 
that kind. But so far as it may be important to me to inform 
my constituents of the view^s and opinions which I entertain on 
this subject, that speech will answer my purpose. 

I will only say, then, here and now, that I have changed no 
opinion or intention which I then expressed. I am in favor, 
now as then, of the unconditional and immediate admission of 
California to the Union, and for that measure, I rejoice to say, I 
have at last had the satisfaction of voting. I am in favor, now 
as then, of settling this boundary line between New Mexico and 
Texas as a separate and independent question, and for that 
measure, also, my colleague (Hon. John Davis) and myself have 
already given votes, which proved to be essential to its passage. 
And with regard to New Mexico herself, for the purpose of avoid- 
ing that strife and contention which, I fear, is always destined to 
spring up in this country, whenever a Territorial Government is 
proposed to be established on soil now free, and in regard to which 
any question of slavery can arise, I am in favor, now as then, of 
pursuing the plan proposed by the late lamented President of 
the United States, — the plan of admitting New Mexico as a 
State, as soon as she shall present herself with a republican Con- 
stitution, and of postponing all consideration of this Territorial 
question until that time shall arrive. 

To these views. Sir, I still adhere. No change of administra- 



THE BOUNDARY OP NEW MEXICO AND TEXAS. 707 

tion, and no change of my own position, has altered them in 
the slightest degree. If tliis bill, therefore, is pressed to a vote, 
I shall vote against it. If, in the mean time, however, a motion 
shall be made to apply to New Mexico the principle of the ordi- 
nance of 1787, I shall vote in favor of that motion. I am 
aware, Sir, that the revival of this principle has been stigma- 
tized in some quarters as odious and offensive to the South. I 
can only say that I shall vote for it in no spirit of offence. I 
shall vote for it for no mere purpose of obtaining a sectional 
preponderance, and with no vain view of crowding slavery out 
of existence by confining it within its present limits. But I 
shall vote for it because I believe such a restriction to be for the 
highest and best interests, for the present and for the permanent 
welfare, of the new Commonwealth, whose destinies are now 
about to be determined. My own earnest desire, however, 
would be, that the Congress of the United States should, at no 
distant day, accept and ratify the Constitution which New 
Mexico herself has framed; and, should thus settle this question, 
once and forever, in the only w^ay in which it can be fully and 
finally settled. It has already been stated by the President of 
the United States that this Constitution will come here in the 
shape of a " petition " to Congress to admit New Mexico into 
the Union. Now, it would seem to me nothing more than jus- 
tice that, instead of going on with the bill under consideration, 
we should wait to receive this petition, in order to have the 
views and wishes of the people of New Mexico fairly before us, 
and in order that we may decide intelligently and deliberately 
upon the suggestions which they may make in regard to their 
own future condition. At any rate, Sir, these are the views 
which I expressed elsewhere many months ago, and these are 
the views upon which I shall act here to-day. 



PROTEST AGAINST THE ADMISSION OF CALIFORNIA. 

REMARKS IN THE SENATE OF THE UNITE1> STATES ON RECEIVING A PRO- 
TEST FROM A NUMBER OF SOUTHERN SENATORS, AUGI»T 14, 1850. 



Mr. President, I would respectfully ask of the Chair whe- 
ther the question upon receiving this protest is understood to 
include the proposition to enter it on the journal? In other 
words, is there to he more than one question upon this subject? 
Will the question be first on receiving the paper, and then on 
entering it upon the journal? 

The President. The question now is on the reception of the 

paper. 

Mr. Winthrop. I think it important that the distinction, 
which I have stated, should be taken by the Senate and by the 
Chair. If the question is merely whether this paper shall be 
received by the Senate, and shall be placed with other papers 
which are respectfully presented, on the files of the Senate, with- 
out being entered upon the journals, I should have no objection 
to such a course. 

The President. The Chair, on reflection, would state to 
the Senator, that the reception of the paper would carry it on 
the journal. 

Mr. Winthrop. I presumed that such would be the decision 
of the Chair. There is, then, but one question to be decided ; and 
that is, shall the paper be received, and entered upon the journals 
of the Senate? 

Sir, I have always been in favor of the largest courtesy, and 
of the most liberal construction of rules, in regard to petitions, 
memorials, and other papers, which might be presented to Con- 



PROTEST AGAINST THE ADMISSION OP CALIFORNIA. 709 

gress. My honorable friend, the Senator from Illinois, (Gen. 
Shields,) has compared this question to a question upon receiv- 
ing a petition. I am inclined to think that the Senator from Vir- 
ginia, who presented the paper, would be the last who would 
desire to place it on that ground. I am inclined to think that 
his views with regard to the reception of petitions are much 
more circumscribed than my own. While I should go for the 
largest liberty of presenting petitions, properly so called, from 
any part of the people of the United States, upon any subject 
upon which they may see fit to address us, he would be disposed 
to limit that reception by certain rules, to which I need not allude. 
It seems to me, however, that there is no analogy whatever 
between the question of receiving petitions, or memorials, or 
remonstrances from the people, and that of receiving a protest 
from honorable members of this body — who are privileged to 
speak here, and to vote here, in their own persons — with a 
view to entering that protest upon the journal. 

Sir, the Constitution has already secured to the honorable 
member from Virginia, and to those who are associated with 
him in this proceeding, the privilege of entering upon the journal 
the only protest really worth making. That constitutional protest 
does not consist, indeed, of a lengthened argument or a heated 
appeal on any question which may be submitted to us. But it 
consists in that which is more potent than any argument or any 
appeal — the emphatic word " no." That protest remains on 
the journal. The Constitution has secured them the right of 
placing it there, and there it stands. Their explanations are for 
themselves, and for the States which they represent. 

I remember. Sir, at this moment, but one parliamentary body 
in the world, which acknowledges an inherent right in its mem- 
bers to enter their protests upon the journals.* That body is the 
British House of Lords. It is the privilege of every peer, as I 
understand it, to enter upon the journals his protest against any 
measure which may have been passed contrary to his own indi- 
vidual views or wishes. But what has been the practice in our 

* The privilege of " inserting in the record an opinion contrary to the resohition of 
the majority " is secured to the members of the Executive Council of Massachusetts, 
by a special provision of the Constitution, and other State Constitutions may contain 
similar provisions. 

60 



710 PllOTEST AGAINST THE ADMISSION OF CALIFORNIA. 

own country ? You, yourself, Mr. President, have read to us an 
authority upon this subject. It seems that in the earliest days 
of our history, when there may have been something more of a 
disposition than I hope prevails among us now, to copy the pre- 
cedents of the British Government, a rule was introduced into 
this body for the purpose of securing to the Senators of the 
several States this privilege which belongs to the peers of the 
British Parliament. That proposition was negatived. I know 
not by what majority, for you did not read the record ; I know 
not by whose votes; but the rule was rejected. It was thus 
declared in the early days of our history that this body should 
not be assimilated to the British House of Lords in this respect, 
however it may be in any other ; and that individual Senators 
should not be allowed the privilege of spreading upon the jour- 
nals the reasons which may have influenced their votes. 

I am sure, that my honorable friend from Virginia would 
be the last, and that the State which he represents would be the 
last, in these later days of the Republic, to endeavor to bring 
about a greater analogy between that body and this, and to 
attempt to secure for us privileges which have heretofore been 
confined to an aristocratic peerage. I say this in the utmost 
sincerity, and with the most perfect respect for the honorable 
Senator from Virginia. Indeed, nothing goes more against my 
own heart, than to refuse any privilege which may be asked by 
a minority, upon this or upon any other question. 

But, Sir, I cannot forget that the day has been when I myself 
have desired to place my name — not indeed upon the journals 
of this body, for I have come here too recently to have had any 
desires on the subject, but upon the records of another body, in 
opposition to more than one measure which has been brought 
up for my vote. Where is the protest against the annexation of 
Texas? If the precedent which it is now proposed to establish, 
had been in existence at that time, can there be a doubt that 
Northern Senators, if not Southern Senators — for there were 
Senators from the South, as well as Senators from the North, 
who considered that measure unconstitutional, and I have now 
in my eye an honorable Senator from Georgia (Mr. Berrien) who 
cooperated with us at the time on constitutional grounds — can 



PROTEST AGAINST THE ADMISSION OF CALIFORNIA. 711 

there be a doubt, I say, that there would have been both North- 
ern and Southern Senators, and Northern and Southern Repre- 
sentatives, who would have desired to avail themselves of an 
opportunity to place upon the record their protest against the 
annexation of Texas, at the time it was accomplished ? 

I am unwilling to admit, Mr. President, that this is the first 
time in our history that an act has been consummated which 
renders such a protest justifiable or proper. I am unwilling to 
admit, that there has been no measure passed in the whole his- 
tory of this Government, in opposition to which members of 
either branch were entitled, upon principles of courtesy, if cour- 
tesy only is to prevail here, to enter their names and their rea- 
sons upon the record. 

Why, Sir, I remember the bill for the declaration of the Mex- 
ican war, or, T should rather say, for the recognition of the Mex- 
ican war, in which that memorable preamble was inserted, 
" whereas war exists by the act of Mexico," &c. That bill was 
passed with little or no debate ; but, at the very moment of its 
passage in the other branch of Congress, I drew up a protest 
against that preamble. It is still extant, not indeed in " very 
choice Italian," but in such chirography as I was able at the 
moment to command. It was signed by more than myself. It 
was signed by an honorable friend from Connecticut, (Mr. Tru- 
man Smith,) now a member of this body, and by an honorable 
member from Ohio, (Mr. Vinton.) But we found that neither 
precedent nor principle, as we thought, would sanction us in any 
attempt to place that protest upon the record, and we therefore 
forbore the attempt. 

Nov/, Sir, for myself, I do not desire to add fuel to the flame, 
which seems almost ready to consume the country. I desire to 
do nothing, and to say nothing, to add to the irritation which 
exists on the other side of this chamber, and in certain quarters 
of the Union. I am willing even to acknowledge, and I do 
acknowledge, that there are considerations and circumstances 
connected with the admission of California, which are calculated 
to excite and irritate gentlemen from the Southern States. I 
would spare their feelings. But at the same time I would ad- 
here, now and always, to those wholesome precedents, and I 



712 PROTEST AGAINST THE ADMISSION OF CALIFORNIA. 

may add, to those established principles, which have heretofore 
governed us in these legislative bodies. I say those established 
principles. Sir, for I can hardly help regarding this as a question 
of principle. The Constitution calls upon us to do what? To 
keep a journal of our proceedings, in order that the people may 
be able to see what measures have passed, and who are re- 
sponsible for those measures. Is this paper any part of our 
proceedings? The Constitution does not secure to a member 
the privilege of entering his reasons on the record, nor does it, 
in express terms, prohibit him from doing so. But is there not 
something of an implication to be derived from this express 
injunction of the Constitution, that we should keep a journal of 
our proceedings ? For, of what use will it be to keep such a 
journal, if the record of our proceedings is to be cumbered and 
complicated and smothered up by such a succession of protests 
as will inevitably succeed each other upon this, and upon other 
questions, if such a precedent shall now be established ? "Where 
will the practice stop ? Sir, if the question were merely to receive 
this paper, and treat it respectfully, as we treat petitions and me- 
morials, it would gratify me to unite in assenting to such a course. 
But with the greatest possible respect for the Senators who have 
signed it, I cannot vote for its reception, if the question of recep-- 
tion involves also the question of entering it upon the journal - 



THE FUGITIYE SLAYE LAW. 



REMARKS IN THE SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES, AVGUST 19,1850. 



I HAPPEN to have on my table, at this moment, INlr. President, 
a little pamphlet, of which this is, I think, the second number, 
entitled, " The United States Postal Guide," and which contains 
a paragraph which I would venture to recommend to the atten- 
tion of the Senator from Virginia, (Mr. Mason.) It is in these 
w^ords : — 

'• Fugitive Slaves. In an action brought in the United States District Court of 
the Southern District of Iowa, by Ruell Daggs, of Clark county, Missouri, plaintiff, 
against Elihu Frazier and four other defendants, for harboring, concealing, and pre- 
venting the arrest of plaintiff's slaves, who had absconded into Iowa, the jury found a 
verdict for the plaintiffs of S2,900. 

"A similar trial had before Judge McLean, in the Circuit Court of the United 
States, by John Norris, of Kentucky, against eight residents of JMichigan. The num- 
ber of slaves was four, and the damages given by the jury $2,856." 

Now, Sir, here we have the result of the latest judicial pro- 
ceedings on the subject before us. Here we have a record of 
the most recent decisions which have taken place in two of the 
free States of this Union. And it seems to me that here is quite 
sufficient evidence to show that, whatever insurmountable obsta- 
cles there may be in a trial by jury to the recovery of the 
fugitive slaves themselves, there is no such insurmountable 
obstacle to the recovery of the most ample and exemplary 
damages against those who have aided in their escape. I think 
this will serve, to some extent, as an answer to the suggestions 
of the Senator from Virginia. It will prove, at any rate, that 
the South is not so entirely without remedy or redress for the 
wrongs of which she complains, even as the law now stands. 
For myself. Sir, without intending to detain the Senate at any 

60* 



714 THE FUGITIVE SLAVE LAW. 

length, I cannot help expressing my hearty concurrence in the 
amendment proposed by the Senator from New Jersey, (Mr. Day- 
ton.) I understand that it is the same proposition which was 
laid on the table of the Senate, some weeks ago, by my distin- 
guished predecessor in this seat, (Mr. Webster,) and which was 
prepared and proposed by him after a careful consultation with 
one of the judges of the Supreme Court, (Mr. Justice McLean,) 
whose decisions in cases of this kind have always, I believe, 
been satisfactory to the country.* I hold it to be a just and 
reasonable provision, and one which ought to form a part of 
any bill which shall be passed for this purpose. The Senator 
from Georgia seemed to go upon the idea that there is but 
one question to be decided with regard to a person claimed as 
a fugitive from labor ; and that is the question whether he belongs 
to, or owes labor or service to, the party who claims him. But 
it seems to me that there is another and a preliminary question, 
and that is, whether he is a fugitive at all ; whether he belongs 
or owes service to anybody ? It must always be a question 
whether such a person be your slave, or whether he be our free- 
man ? Now, whether he be your slave might be a question very 
proper to be tried by a jury of the vicinage, and to be decided 
on the spot where the professed owner resides ; but whether he be 
our freeman would seem to be a question which, upon the very 
same principle, should be tried where he is seized, and where the 
immediate liberty which he enjoys is about to be taken away 
from him. 

Mr. Butler. "Will the Senator allow me to ask the question fairly, so as to put it 
before the country, whether the Senator knows of a single instance where a citizen has 
claimed a person as a slave who was not his own, or where one has so claimed a per- 
son while acting as an agent for the owner 1 

Mr. Winthrop. Mr. President, if I understand aright the 
history of this very law of 1793, which we are now engaged in 
amending, I think the Senator from South Carolina will be 
answered if I briefly recite that history. As I understand the 
matter, that law originated on this wise. In the year 1788 or 
1789, a free negro, residing in the State of Pennsylvania, named 

* Webster's Works, Little & Brown's ed. 1851, vol. v. pp. 373, 374. 



THE FUGITIVE SLAVE LAW. 715; 

John, was kidnapped by three white men from the State of Vir- 
ginia. These three white men were indicted for the crime ; and 
as they had fled to the State of Virginia, they were demanded 
by Governor Mifflin, of Pennsylvania, under the instigation of 
the abolition society of that State, over which, if I mistake not, 
Benjamin Franklin about that time presided. The Governor of 
Virginia, whose name I do not remember,* decided that there 
was no law for carrying into effect that clause of the Federal 
Constitution just then going into operation, under which fugi- 
tives from justice were to be surrendered. He therefore refused 
to deliver up the three white men, indicted as having kidnapped 
a free negro. Governor Mifflin, soon after, communicated these 
facts to General Washington, then President of the United 
States, who communicated them to Congress, and upon this 
communication the law of 1793 was based. That law provides, 
first, for the return of fugitives from justice, and then for the 
return of fugitives from service or labor. And the brief history 
which I have thus given of its origin, will in some degree 
account for the fact, that these two incongruous matters are 
mingled together in the same bill. 

It seems then, Mr. President, that, at the very outset of the 
history of this Government, a case like that respecting which 
the Senator from South Carolina inquires, did actually occur, 
and that it gave occasion to the passage of the very statute 
which is now, for the first time, about to be amended. I 
cannot answer as to other cases. There may, or may not, 
have been others. It is said that they are not very likely to 
happen, and I admit that it is so. But as long as there is 
danger that they will occur, as long as there is a possibility 
that they may occur, so long will there be opposition to the 
seizure and abduction of supposed fugitives in the summary 
and irresponsible manner provided for in this bill. And this 
leads me, Sir, to say one word more. I believe, in all sincerity, 
that more fugitives from labor and service would be recap- 
tured and recovered by their owners under a law providing for a 
trial by jury, than under the law of 1793, or under the law which 
the Senator from Virginia has now submitted to our consider-; 

* Beverly Eandolph, 



716 THE FUGITIVE SLAVE LAW. 

ation. And why would it be so ? Because all laws depend in no 
small degree for their efficiency upon the public sentiment of the 
State or the community in which they are to be executed. If 
there be a strong sense of the injustice and oppressiveness of 
any particular provision, whether of this law or of any other, 
there will always be more or less of opposition to its execution. 
On the other hand, if provisions should be inserted in this bill 
like those proposed by the Senator from New Jersey, which 
cannot but accord with the sense of justice, and the strong pre- 
conceived opinion of right, of the communities in which this 
law is to have its main operation and effect, I believe it would 
in most cases be faithfully carried out, and that more fugitives 
from labor would be returned to their masters under its operation, 
than have been returned within the last half century. That is 
my own honest opinion. 

At any rate. Sir, I shall vote for the amendment offered by 
the Senator from New Jersey, as right and just in itself, what- 
ever may be its effect. I am in favor of recognizing the right of 
trial by jury in all cases where a question of personal liberty is 
concerned. I hope the amendment will be adopted. But if not, 
I shall offer one myself, which shall at least provide that the writ 
of Habeas Corpus may be allowed in cases of this kind, and that 
the certificates of these commissioners shall not prevent a review 
of the question by some more responsible magistrate than is 
provided for in this bill. 

Mr. INIasox. I took some little interest in learning the facts of the case just ad- 
verted to by the honorable Senator from INIassachusetts. I understood the Senator to 
reply to the question of my friend from South Carolina, which was, whether he ever 
knew of any instance in which a man claimed as a slave by a claimant from a slave 
State was found to be a free man and not a slave ; and the Senator, by way of addu- 
cing a case, instanced that out of which this law of 1793 grew. The history of that 
law I understand, I think, as well as the honorable Senator from IMassachusetts : and 
it is this : Tliree men, from the State of Virginia, went into the State of Pennsylva- 
nia, and can-icd oft' a negro, and brought him to the State of Virginia. And they 
were indicted in Pennsylvania for " kidnapping," as it is called. A demand was made 
by the Governor of Pennsylvania upon the Governor of Virginia for the restoration, 
or rather the surrendering, of these three men as fugitives from justice, the offence 
charged being that they had committed a felony, in taking oft' this negro who was 
alleged to be free. Now, I want to know from the Senator from Massachusetts where 
he learns that the negro thus taken in Pennsylvania was a free man and not a slave ? 



THE PUGITIVE SLAVE LAW. 717 

Mr. Winthrop. I will answer the honorable Senator from 
Virginia with great pleasure. In the first place, Sir, our rule of 
presumption in JMassachusetts is precisely opposite to that which 
I believe generally prevails in Virginia. We hold that every 
colored person is a freeman until he is proved to be a slave. 
Now, there is no proof or allegation anywhere that this kid- 
napped negro was not free, — and the very indictment found 
against those who seized him and sold him, would seem to settle 
the question that he was free. I stated, however, in the second 
place, that he was a freeman, upon the evidence of a report which 
was made to the Legislature of Massachusetts some years ago, 
by a committee which had investigated the facts, and which de- 
scribes him as " a free negro, named John." I do not understand, 
moreover, that in any of the proceedings connected with this 
case, or in any of the papers communicated to Congress at the 
time, the suggestion was anywhere made that this man was a 
slave; but, on the contrary, I understand that those papers every-, 
where speak of him as a freeman.* In regard to this point, how-? 
ever, I am ready to be corrected. i 

But, Sir, as I am called up again upon this subject, I cannot 
resist the opportunity of giving one more answer to the inquiry 
of my honorable friend from South Carolina, (Mr. Butler.) His 
question in substance is, where is there an instance of a free 
person being seized as a slave ? Now, Sir, he must allow me 
to remind him — and I assure him that I do so in no mere 
spirit of crimination or reproach — that such a thing may hap- 
pen even under the express laws of his own State. It is well 
known, and I believe that the Senator from South Carolina 
himself has on some occasion expressed his regret at the fact, — 
that the State of South Carolina, and other slaveholding States, 
have laws upon their statute-books under which free persons of. 
color, coming from Boston or New York or Philadelphia, or any 
other of the commercial cities of the Union, in Northern vessels, 
and arriving in Southern ports, may be seized, without any 
charge of crime, and without any examination except to ascer- 
tain the color of their skin, — may be carried on shore and im- 

* American State Papers, vol. XX. pp. 38-43. 



718 THE FUGITIVE SLAVE LAW. 

prisoned, — and unless, when the vessel sails, the master of the 
vessel should reclaim them, and pay a pretty heavy reckoning 
for their maintenance in jail during the whole period of their 
detention, may be sold into slavery for life. Now, supposing 
that one of these free colored persons of the State of Massachu- 
setts, or of any other State, having been seized, while on board 
of a vessel in which he was lawfully engaged, and having been 
imprisoned and sold into slavery in the manner and under the 
circumstances which I have stated, should make his escape, and 
should succeed in getting back to the port from whence he 
sailed, — would there be any thing so very unreasonable in our 
calling for a trial by jury upon a question whether he should be 
remanded into slavery ? Would it be altogether incumbent 
upon us, do you think. Sir, to take the mere oral testimony of 
the claimant, — even though he might have purchased the negro 
bond fide, — and at the same time to refuse to take the testimony 
of the fugitive himself, or of those who might have known him 
as a freeman before he went on the ill-starred voyage which ter- 
minated in his being seized and sold as a slave ? 

Here again, then, is a case, in which such an occurrence as 
that alluded to by the Senator from South Carolina, might hap- 
pen. I do not say that it is very likely to happen; but I cannot 
help adding in this connection, that, in my judgment, there is no 
grievance, no complaint, which the Southern States have ever 
arrayed against the Northern States, which can be compared for 
a moment with the grievance which the Northern States have 
to complain of at the hands of the Southern States in the pro- 
visions of these laws, — laws by which the cooks and stewards 
engaged on board their vessels, and in the prosecution of their 
lawful employments, are thus liable to be seized and sold into 
slavery.* 

* It was proposed to include in this volume some passages of a debate on this subject, 
and ])articularlv in regard to the laws of Louisiana, which occurred incidentally in 
the Senate soon after these remarks were made. But it was found impossible to 
detach what was said by Mr. Winthrop from its connection, and to insert it here in a 
separate form, without \loinjjj <i;reat injustice both to liimself and others. Tlie same 
consideration prevents the insertion of other remarks upon other subjects durinj: Mr. 
Winthrop's Senatorial service. Meantime, while this volume is passing through the 
press, it is noticed witli pleasure, that tlic Legishiturc of Louisiana have passed an act, 
which received tiic signature of the Governor of that State on the 18th of March, 
18.52, essentially modifying the law of 1842, and relieving it of many of its most 
obnoxious and oppressive fcatui-es. 



THE FUGITIVE SLAVE LAW. 719 

Before taking my seat, Sir, I will venture to make one sug- 
gestion, a little more practical, perhaps, in regard to this sum- 
mary process recommended by the amendment of the Senator 
from Virginia. Here is a case referred to in his own report — 
the celebrated case of Prigg v. The Commonwealth of Pennsyl- 
vania. What were the circumstances of tiiat case ? It seems 
that a negro woman named Margaret Morgan had fled from 
service and escaped to Pennsylvania in the year 1832; and that 
the defendant, as the legally constituted agent of Margaret Ash- 
more, had caused the said Margaret Morgan to be apprehended 
in the year 1837. Now, here is an interval of five years from 
the time of the escape to the time of the arrest; and there might 
be an interval of ten years, or of twenty years even, so far as 
any provision of this bill is concerned. There is no statute of 
limitations here in regard to the rights or powers of the claim- 
ant. He may come into a free State after any lapse of time, 
however long, and upon his mere oral testimony, when his recol- 
lections of the fugitive himself may be ever so indistinct, and 
when the fugitive himself may be so much changed as to render 
liability to mistake ever so great, he may demand of one of 
these commissioners the certificate, which may settle forever 
against the party claimed the question of his right to freedom. 
Sir, if the trial by jury is not to be allowed in all cases, would it 
not be proper, would it not be just, to incorporate into this law 
something of the principle of " fresh pursuit;" giving to all 
persons the right of trial by jury, except in cases of such fresh 
pursuit ; and giving to that fresh pursuit a limit of not exceed- 
ing one or two years at the furthest? When a longer time than 
this has elapsed since the alleged fugitive escaped, ought there 
not, I ask, to be ample opportunity afforded for investigation, 
on the spot where he is seized, in order that it may be ascer- 
tained, beyond all doubt, whether the party claimed be really 
the fugitive he is charged with being, and whether there may 
not be those in the neighborhood who have known him as one 
born and brought up among themselves, and as now wrongfully 
seized as a runaway slave ? I can only say that such a course 
would seem to me eminently just and proper. 



THE OTTOMAN EMPIEE. 

A SPEECH MADE AT THE PUBLIC DINNER GIVEN TO AMIN BEY BY THE 
MERCHANTS OF BOSTON, NOVEMBER 4, 1850. 



I AM greatly honored, Mr. President, by the sentiment just 
proposed, and I beg my good friend, the Vice-President, (Hon. 
Benjamin Seaver,) to accept my hearty thanks for the kind and 
complimentary terms in which he has presented my name to the 
company. I am most grateful for the opportunity of meeting 
with so large a number of the intelligent and enterprising mer- 
chants of Boston, and of uniting with them in a tender of 
deserved hospitality, and in a tribute of just respect, to the Com- 
missioner of his Imperial Majesty, the Sultan of Turkey. ' 

And yet, I cannot but reflect, even as I pronounce these words, 
how strangely they would have sounded in the ears of our 
fathers not many generations back, or even in our own ears not 
many years ago. A deserved tender of hospitality, a just tribute 
of respect, to the Kepresentative of the Grand Turk ! Sir, the 
country from which your amiable and distinguished guest has 
come, was not altogether unknown to some of the early Ameri- 
can discoverers and settlers. John Smith — do not smile too 
soon, Mr. President, for though the name has become proverbi- 
ally generic in these latter days, it was once identified and indi- 
vidualized as the name of one of the most gallant navigators 
and captains which the world has ever known — that John 
Smith who first gave the cherished name of New England to 
what the Pilgrims of the Mayflower cafled "these Northern 
parts of Virginia " — he, I say, was well acquainted with Tur- 
key ; and two centuries and a half ago, he gave the name of a 
Turkish lady to one of the Capes of our own Massachusetts 



THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE. 721 

Bay. But he knew Turkey as a prison and a dungeon, and he 
called what is now Cape Ann, Cape Trag-abig'zanda, only to 
commemorate his affection for one who had soothed the rigors 
of a long and loathsome captivity. 

Nor was Turkey an unknown land to at least one of those 
Winthrops of the olden time, with whom the Vice-President has 
so kindly connected me. In turning over some old family papers 
since my return home, I have stumbled on the original auto- 
graph of a note from John "VVinthrop, the younger, dated " De- 
cember 26th, 1628, at the Castles of the Hellespont," whither he 
had gone, as is supposed, as the Secretary of Sir Peter Wich, 
the British Ambassador at Constantinople. The associations of 
that day, however, with those remote regions, were by no means 
of an agreeable character, and I should hardly dare to dwell 
longer upon them on this occasion and in this presence. 

I rejoice that events have occurred to break the spell of that 
hereditary prejudice, which has so long prevailed in the minds of 
not a few of us, towards the Ottoman Empire. I rejoice that 
our associations with Turkey are no longer those only of the 
plague and the bowstring ; that we are encouraged and author- 
ized to look to her hereafter for something better than a little 
coarse wool for our blankets, or a few figs for our dessert, or even a 
little opium or rhubarb for our medicine chests ; that, in a word, 
we are encouraged and warranted to look to her, under the 
auspices and administration of her young, gallant, and generous 
Sultan, for examples of reform, of toleration, of liberality, of a 
magnanimous and chivalrous humanity, which are worthy of 
the admiration and imitation of all mankind. I rejoice, espe- 
cially, that an occasion has been afforded for testifying the deep 
sense which is entertained throughout our country, of the 
noble conduct of the Sublime Porte in regard to the unfortunate 
exiles of Hungary. 

The influence which the Ottoman Empire seems destined to 
exert over the relations of Eastern and Western Europe, is of 
the most interesting and important character ; and, while we all 
hold steadfastly to the great principle of neutrality which Wash- 
ington established and enforced, we yet cannot suppress our 
satisfaction that this influence is now in the hands of one, who 

61 



722 THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE. 

seems determined to wield it fearlessly for the best interests of 
civilization and humanity. 

And now, Sir, let us hope that our distinguished friend, Amin 
Bey, may return home with some not less favorable impressions 
of our own land. Of our enterprise, of our industry, of our 
immense material production, of our rapid progress in arts and 
improvements of every kind, of our vast territorial extent, he 
cannot fail to testify. Let us hope that he may be able to speak 
also of internal order,' of domestic tranquillity, of wise and just 
laws, faithfully administered and promptly obeyed, of a happy, 
contented, and united people, commending by their practice and 
example, as well as by their principles and precepts, the institu- 
tions under which they live. 

The distinguished gentleman who preceded me, (Mr. Web- 
ster,) and whom I have been under the disadvantage of follow- 
ing in other scenes as well as here, has spoken of the Union 
of these States. There is no language so strong or so emphatic, 
which even he can use, as to the importance of preserving that 
Union, which does not meet with a prompt and cordial echo 
in my own bosom. To the eyes of Amin Bey, and to the eyes 
of all foreign nations, we are indeed but one country, from the 
Atlantic to the Pacific. To them there is no Boston or New 
York, no Carolina or Louisiana. Our commerce goes forth 
under one and the same flag, whether from the Bay of Mas- 
sachusetts or from the "golden gate" of California. Under 
that flag, it has been protected, prospered, and extended beyond 
example. Under that flag, new fields are opening to it, and new 
triumphs are before it. May our distinguished guest take home 
with him an assurance, founded upon all that he has seen and 
all that he has heard, of the resolution of us all, that the flag of 
our Union shall still and always remain one and the same, from 
j ocean to ocean, untorn and untarnished, proof alike against 

/ every thing of foreign assault and every thing of domestic 

dissension ! 



RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION OF THE YOUNG. 

A SPEECH MADE AT THE ANNIVERSARY MEETING OF THE WARREN STREET 
CHAPEL ASSOCIATION, ON SUNDAY EVENING, APRIL 27, 1851. 



The Secretary of the Association (Rev. C. F. Barnard) will 
bear me witness, Ladies and Gentlemen, that when I accepted 
his kind invitation to be present and preside here this evening, 
there was an express understanding and stipulation between 
us, that I was not to be held responsible for any thing in the 
nature of an Address. I am sure, however, that you will all 
pardon me, if, before putting a formal and final question upon 
the adoption of this Report, I shall add a very few words to 
what has already been so impressively said by those who have 
preceded me. I need not assure you that I have listened with 
the deepest interest to the account which the Report has given 
of the progress and prospects of this Institution. No man, 
indeed, who has a heart within his bosom, a heart either for the 
welfare of man or for the glory of God, could have listened 
to that account without emotions deeper than he could readily 
find words to express. For myself, certainly, I know of few 
things better calculated to touch and thrill the inmost suscepti- 
bilities of a Christian soul, than the precise picture presented 
to us in this paper; the picture of so many young children, 
rescued from the snares of ignorance, idleness, and vice; snatch- 
ed, many of them, as brands from the burning ; and trained up 
to habits of industry, to the love of truth, to the practice of virtue, 
to the knowledge and praise of God. And I may be permitted 
to add, that I know of no person who has secured for himself 
a prouder or more enviable distinction than one, who, having 



724 RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION OF THE YOUNG. 

drawn such a picture with fidelity, and having gracefully and 
modestly held it up to the public view, can say with truth, 
" these are the fruits of my labors ; this is the account of my 
stewardship." 

It is now, I think, not far from a quarter of a century, since 
your Secretary and myself, with at least one other of those 
whom I have seen at my side this evening, having finished our 
collegiate course, left the walls of the neighboring University 
together. "We had many classmates and common friends who 
were soon scattered along the various paths of life, and in vari- 
ous parts of the country. Some of them, indeed, of the richest 
promise, were struck down at the very threshold of their career, 
and others of them have since fallen in more advanced stages of 
manhood ; but the greater part have remained to this day, and 
not a few have reached high degrees of preferment in social, 
literary, or political life. I hazard nothing, however, in saying, 
that there is not one of them who could have been present here 
this evening, and listened to the account which my friend has 
given of the work to which he has so successfully devoted him- 
self, without feeling the comparative worthlessness of his own 
pursuits, or without uniting with me in admitting, that while so 
many of us have been careful and cumbered about many things, 
our brother has chosen that good part, which shall not be taken 
away from him. 

Certainly, no one can deny or doubt for a moment, that the 
work in which this Association is engaged, is one of the great 
works of the day, and one which demands the active sympathy 
and cooperation of every patriot as well as of every Christian. I 
need not say that it is a work enjoined upon us by the highest 
sanctions of religious obligation. I need not remind you in this 
place, and in this presence, that there is nothing more exquisite 
in the example of our Saviour than his tenderness for young 
children ; and that there is hardly any thing more memorable in 
his teachings than the woe which he denounced against those 
by whom one of these little ones should be offended. But we 
need not look to the word of God, or to the example of Christ, to 
find motives for sustaining such institutions as this. If we were 
to throw aside all considerations of religious obligation ; if we 



RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION OF THE YOUNG. 725 

were to be governed only by the most selfish calculations of 
worldly policy, this Institution, and others of a kindred character, 
could never be permitted to fail or languish for want of friends 
or for want of funds. Does any one point me to economical 
considerations ? Why, does not the whole experience of our 
age and of our country prove, that what we save in schools we 
must pay for in prisons? — That what we economize in the pre- 
vention of vice and crime, we must pay for, and pay for a hun- 
dredfold, not merely in the expense of their detection and punish- 
ment, but in the thousand injuries and losses which they inflict 
upon society? 

In whatever aspect we contemplate the community in which 
we live, whether we look to the wide range of our extended 
Country, or to the narrow limits of our own State or City, we 
shall find everywhere, that our interests are inseparably identified 
with the great cause of education and religion. If this Republic 
is to stand, if these free institutions of ours are to endure, if this 
venerated Commonwealth is to maintain any thing of its ancient 
character and consequence, if this beloved City of ours is to 
enjoy peace within its walls and prosperity within its palaces, it 
will not be owing, primarily and principally, to our armies or 
navies, to our courts or congresses, to our sheriffs or policemen, 
(though I would by no means speak lightly of the necessary 
machinery of government,) but it will be owing, first and above 
all, to the blessing of God upon our efforts to train up our child- 
ren in the way they should go, so that when they are old they 
may not depart from it. There are others who may see greater 
dangers from political agitation or sectional collision, and I 
would not underrate the immediate troubles of the times ; but 
the greatest danger which presents itself to my own mind, as I 
attempt to cast the horoscope of my country, is that arising 
from the gradual growth and increase among us of a population 
not prepared for liberty, not fitted for freedom, not capable of 
self-control, not educated and instructed in those principles of 
morality and virtue, of law and order, of the fear of God and of 
respect for government, upon which all republics must rest for 
their foundation, and which they absolutely require for their sta- 
bility and success. 

61» 



72G llELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION OF THE YOUNG. 

And, ray friends, we must meet this danger at the threshold, 
or it will be too late. We must grapple with it now, and 
through the instrumentality of institutions like this, or it will 
grow too strong for us. Who shall say how much of the peace 
and prosperity of our Commonwealth, or even of our whole 
Country, may depend upon those little groups of idle, profane, 
and ragged boys which we see on the sidewalks or at the 
corners of our streets, it may be on some holiday festival, or it 
may be disturbing the quiet of some Sabbath evening? 

We are too apt to forget that these boys are to be the men of 
the future, and perhaps the masters of the future. But let us 
remember, too, that we may be their masters now. Let us 
remember that we may exert influences upon them now, which 
shall control their conduct and their character long after we are 
gone down to our graves. If we will but call them in from 
their evil associations and vicious pursuits, if we will give them 
the means of useful and honorable employment, if we will teach 
them the rich rewards of a life of honesty and virtue and dili- 
gence, if we will open to them the word of life, and show them 
that godliness which has the promise of the life which is, as well 
as of that which is to come, — we shall have made them good 
citizens as well as good Christians, and shall have performed 
one of the highest duties of patriotism as well as of piety. 

I think it was related of an old philosopher, that, on going 
into a school-house, and seeing a band of ill-mannered and ill- 
behaved boys, instead of finding fault with the boys themselves, 
he inflicted a severe chastisement upon the master. This was 
rather a rough proceeding for a philosopher, but it was a forcible 
illustration of a true principle. If the boys in our land are ill- 
mannered and ill-behaved, it is the fault of their parents and 
teachers. It was only this very afternoon that the services of 
the sanctuary which I attended, were disturbed by the crash of 
a window, broken undoubtedly by one of those truant and trou- 
blesome boys which the Secretary has mentioned in his Report. 
My first feeling at this incident was one of indignation at the 
act of the boy, and of a wish that he might be caught and pun- 
ished ; but my second sober thought was one of pity for the 
boy, and of regi-et, I had almost said indignation, that there 



RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION OF THE YOUNG. 727 

were not more of these Warren Street Chapels in onr city, into 
which boys of this character might be brought, and where they 
might be trained up, under the magical influence of brother Har- 
nard, or others like him, to be devout worshippers within the 
temple, instead of rude rioters without. 

My friend who just addressed you, (Hon. James Savage,) has 
reminded us of the storm which has recently swept over our city. 
I believe I am correct in saying, that the experience of those 
who have lived longest among us can recall no equal, can " par- 
allel no fellow," to that storm in violence. More than one of the 
proudest structures of human art have been prostrated in its 
path, and not a few of our fellow beings have perished on the 
sea and on the shore.* 

I doubt not that as we felt the tempest raging around our 
dwellings, and as we perceived how powerless we were to avert 
its approach, to arrest its progress, or to disarm its fury, we 
realized, more vividly than almost ever before, the feebleness of 
man, the omnipotence of God ; and we were ready to exclaim 
with the Psalmist, " except the Lord keep the city, the watch- 
man waketh but in vain." But let us not forget that there are 
storms to be witnessed and to be encountered, in our progress 
through life, of a far more fearful character. There are passions 
in the breast of every human being, which if suffered to swell' 
and rage unchecked, may produce disasters a thousandfold 
more ruinous. But, thank Heaven, against these moral storms 
we may provide. If we will take but seasonable means, we 
may reclaim those passions from their wild nature, and may put 
them under the guardianship of reason, of conscience, and of a 
daily sense of responsibility to God ; and then we are secure. 
The blast of the tempest may dash down in a night the best- 
constructed lights which human ingenuity can set up along our 
shores, and bury the poor mariners in the ruins; but if we will 
once kindle up the spark of conscience in the breast, it may 
defy the convulsions of the elements ; if we will but once build 
up the great beacon of the Bible throughout our land, the rain 
will descend, the floods will come, the winds will blow and beat 

* The storm of April 15-17, 1851, will lonp: be memorable for the overthrow of 
the Light Ilouse ou Minot's Ledge, in Boston Harbor, and for other disasters. 



728 RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION OP THE YOUNG. 

upon it in vain I It will stand secure and unharmed, a lamp 
to our feet and a lantern to our path through all the accidents of 
life, and will conduct us in safety to the haven where we would 
be hereafter. 

Let us, then, cherish every institution like this, for giving the 
Gospel to the poor, and for implanting its precious seeds in the 
youthful mind ; and let the best sympathy of our hearts, and 
the best succor of our hands, be with those who are engaged in 
so noble a work. For myself, I feel it a privilege to be here this 
evening. I thank my friends, the Directors of the Association, 
for the honor they have conferred upon me in calling me to the 
chair ; and I once more express my most earnest wishes for the 
continued success and prosperity of this Institution. 



THE AMERICAN HEYOLUTION. 



A SPEECH DELIVERED AT TUE ANNUAL CITY DINNER IN FANEUIL HALL, 

JULY 4, 185L 



[In reply to the following toast : — " Tlie Past Members of Congress " — Boston is 
justly proud of the list of those of the illustrious dead and of the respected and 
honored living who have represented her interests in tlie National Councils — may 
their enlarged patriotism and devotion to the Constitution be the guiding principles 
which shall ever animate their successors."] 

I COULD not find it in my heart, Mr. Mayor,* to decline the 
kind request of your committee that I would be present here 
to-day and say a few words in reply to the sentiment which has 
just been proposed. I am greatly honored by being designated 
to respond to such a sentiment, and by thus being authorized to 
appropriate to myself some humble share of the compliment 
which it contains. It has been my fortune to serve the people 
of Boston, in the Congress of the United States, for a longer 
period, I believe, than any one who has represented them since 
the adoption of the Constitution. I do not forget, however, by 
whom I have been preceded. I do not forget that upon the list 
of my respected and illustrious predecessors, to which you have 
alluded, are contained the names of Otis and Eustis and Ames, 
among the dead ; of Quincy and Gorham and Lawrence and 
Webster, among the living. As I remember these and other 
names, 1 am deeply sensible of my own deficiencies, both com- 
parative and positive. But while I freely confess myself inferior 
to all who have preceded or followed me, in the ability and 
success of my services, I do not yield to any of them, either 
among the dead or the living, in the warmth of my attachment 

* Hon. John P. Bigelow in the Chair. 



/ 



730 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION. 

to my country and its institutions, in the earnestness of my 
efforts to advance the interests of my constituents, or in the 
sincerity of my desire to promote harmony, conciliation, and 
concord among the whole American people. 

And now, fellow-citizens, I know not how to thank yon for 
this cordial and flattering reception. I am here, as you know, 
with no title to consideration save such as may result from a 
public career which has recently been brought to a close. After 
sixteen or seventeen years of official employment, in different 
branches of the State and National Legislatures, I am once 
more in the rank and file of private citizenship. My place in 
the procession and at the table to-day is among the Exes. An 
ex-member of the General Court, an ex-member of Congress, an 
ex-Speaker, an ex-Senator,* I am an ex-every thing, excepting 
only and always that, which, thank Heaven, no party combina- 
tions and no personal prejudices can ever prevent me from being, 
— a Boston boy, a Massachusetts man, a citizen of the United 
States, an American freeman, — with a heart full of gratitude to 
those to whose unmerited favor I owe whatever honor I have 
enjoyed, and full of love and loyalty also to the Constitution 
and the Union of that native country in whose councils 1 have 
so long served. 

Let me add that I am content with my position ; and it will 
be owing to no effort, solicitation, or desire of my own, if it shall 
ever be changed. There is, in my judgment, quite as much of 
truth, as there is of wit, in the saying of a distinguished Virginia 
politician on some occasion, that, in the alphabet of a true phi- 
losophy, the X's are at least next door to the Y's, (wise.) I will 
not say that " the post of honor is a private station ; " but I will 
say — and you, Mr. Mayor will know how to agree with me — 
that the post of personal comfort, of true satisfaction, and of 
inward peace, is not always a public one. Certainly, fellow- 
citizens, you will all give me credit for realizing at this hour, 
that if a termination of my Congressional career had secured 

* An unexampled Coalition between the Democrats and Free-Soilers, in the 
Legislature of Massachusetts, by which the State and National Offices at their disposal 
were made the subject of a fornu;l negotiation and barter, had brought Mr. Winthroi)'s 
service in the United States Senate to a close on the 7th of February, 1851. Agree- 
ably to the provisions of the contract, Mr. Eantoul was made Senator for the remnant 
of the short term, and Mr. Charles Sumner for the long one. 



THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION. 731 

me no other boon, than that of hereafter enjoying a comfortable 
Fourth of July dinner like this, in old Faneuil Hall, instead of 
being doomed to endure the almost blistering rays of a Wash- 
ington sun every alternate year, I might well congratulate 
myself on the result. 

Why, Sir, where should an American desire to be on a Fourth 
of July but in Faneuil Hall ? Where else can he breathe the 
very natal air of American Independence ? Where else can he 
quench his thirst at the very fountain-head of American liberty ? 
Whatever part Massachusetts may have sustained in the great 
controversies which have agitated the country in later years, — 
and I am not ready to admit that it has been an unworthy or 
an inferior one, — no one will venture to suggest that she played 
any thing less than the first part in that great drama, whose 
opening scenes we are assembled to commemorate. Of how 
many of the great events of the Revolution was not Massachu- 
setts the stage ? How many of them were enacted almost 
within eye-shot and ear-shot of the spot on which we stand ? 
The heights which overhang us on the right hand and on the 
left — the plains which lie behind them — the harbor at our feet 
— the Hall in which we are assembled — State street — the Old 
State House — the Old South — where else was engendered 
that noble spirit, that fearless purpose, that unconquerable 
resolve, of which the Declaration of Independence was, after all, 
only the mere formal and ceremonious proclamation ? We 
sometimes talk playfully about the walls having ears. O, Sir, 
if these walls could have had ears three quarters of a century 
ago, and if they could find a tongue now, what a tale would 
they not unfold of the true rise and progress of American 
Liberty ! 

Let me not seem to disparage the particular act which wc 
meet to celebrate, or to be disposed to deck these hallowed 
columns with laurels stripped from other theatres. There are 
enough for all. The Declaration itself was a bold and noble 
act. Honor to the pen which drafted it I Honor to the tongue 
which advocated it ! Honor to the hands which signed it I 
Honor to the brave hearts and gallant arms which maintained 
and vindicated it I Honor to the five Massachusetts Delegates 



/ 



732 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION. 

in the Congress of that day, who were second to none in that 
illustrious body for ability, eloquence and patriotism, — Hancock, 
under whose sole signature it was originally published, the two 
Adamses, Elbridge Gerry, and Robert Treat Paine. Honor to 
them all! 

Indeed, the more one reflects on the real character of that act, 
the more full of noble courage it appears. Remember, Sir, that 
there was no divided responsibility in that Congress. There 
were no checks and balances in our confederated system. There 
was no concurrent vote of a second branch ; there was no 
Executive signature, or Executive veto, to fall back upon. Fifty- 
six Delegates, chosen, as you yourself have just suggested, long 
before there was any distinct contemplation of such a course, 
sitting in a single chamber, with closed doors, in the capital of a 
colony by no means the most ripe for such a movement, are 
found, doing what ? Taking the tremendous responsibility of 
adopting a resolution, and promulgating an instrument, which 
may not only subject their own property to confiscation, and 
their own necks to the halter, but which must involve their con- 
stituents and their country in a war for existence, and of incal- 
culable duration, with the most powerful nation on the face of 
the earth. There was no example for such a deed. There was 
no precedent on file for such a declaration. And who will say 
that, to put one's name to such an instrument, under such cir- 
cumstances, in the clear, bold, unmistakable characters of John 
Hancock, was an exhibition of a courage less heroic than that 
which has rendered many a name immortal on the field of 
battle ? 

Still, Sir, the way had been opened for such a proceeding ; the 
popular heart had been prepared for it. As was well said by 
John Adams at the time, " the question was not whether by a 
Declaration of Independence we should make ourselves Avhat 
we are not ; but whether we should declare a fact which already 
exists." And how did that fact exist? How had it been brought 
about? By what events, but those which had occurred at Con- 
cord and Lexington, at Bunker Hill and in Faneuil Hall ? By 
what men, but by our own Otis, and Quincy, and Hancock, and 
Hawley, and Bowdoin, and Samuel Adams, and John Adams, 



THE AMERICAN llEVOLUTION. 733 

and Paul Revere, and Prescott, and Warren, and all that glori- 
ous company of Massachusetts patriots, wliosc names will live 
forever ? 

You have all taken notice, I doubt not, fellow-citizens, of 
the beautiful experiment which has been in operation at Bunker 
Hill for some weeks past, for making visible the revolution of 
the earth, by a pendulum suspended from the apex of the monu- 
ment. It has furnished a convincing proof of the correctness of 
those great physical laws of the universe which philosophy had 
long ago unfolded to us. But I could not help reflecting, as I 
witnessed it the other day, that Bunker Hill had done some- 
thing more than merely furnish a convenient place for exhibiting 
the visible and tangible evidence of the world's motion. Sir, it 
has itself made the world move! And if, by some mechanical 
arrangement of pendulums or clock-work, it were possible to 
mark the course of the moral and political changes of man- 
kind, and to trace them back to their original impulse, — 
where, where would it be, but to Bunker Hill or Faneuil Hall, 
that we should betake ourselves — and not to any place nearer 
either to the North Pole or to the Equator — to witness the 
most exact and perfect illustration of the world's progress, and 
to find the very jmrniwi mobile of those great revolutions, 
American and European, by which human liberty, during the 
present century, has been so vastly advanced and extended ? 

I am not disposed, Mr. Mayor, to indulge in too much of local 
complacency, or of sectional pride, on such an occasion as this. 
We have come together, not as Bostonians or as New England- 
ers, but as Americans. We have assembled to celebrate the 
birth-day of our country, and I would embrace in all the good 
wishes and pleasant remembrances and proud anticipations 
which belong to the hour, that whole Country, in all its length 
and breadth, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from the St. Law- 
rence to the Gulf of Mexico. 

I w^ould associate with all the homag'e which we render to the 
memory of the revolutionary patriots and heroes of our own 
State, the Hamiltons and Jays, the Morrises and Franklins, the 
Laurenses and Marions, the Henrys and Jeii'ersons, and, above 
all, the unapproached and unapproachable WASHiNGTOi\,of other 
62 



734 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION. 

States. I would think of our country, to-day and always, as 
one in the glories of the past, one in the grandeur of the present, 
and one, undivided and indivisible, in the destinies of the future. 
But at a moment when there seems to be a willingness in some 
quarters to disparage our ancient Commonwealth, and almost to 
rule her out from the catalogue of patriot States, I have not 
been unwilling to revive some recollections of our local history, 
and of the part which she has played in other days. I could 
hardly help feeling that, if we were to hold our peace, the very 
stones would cry out. Sir, in all that relates to Liberty and 
Union, Massachusetts, I am persuaded, is to-day just what she 
was seventy-five years ago. There is no variableness or sha- 
dow of turning in her devotion to the great principles of her 
revolutionary fathers, nor will she ever, as I believe, be found 
wanting to any just obligation to her sister States. 

Mr. Mayor, the act of the 4th of July, 1776, was an act of 
revolution. It was an act of organized and systematic resist- 
ance to an oppressive and tyrannical government. It was a 
solemn and stern appeal from the decrees of a foreign despot, to 
that great original right of self-preservation and self-government 
which the Declaration so nobly promulgates. Thanks to the 
courage of our fathers, the appeal was successful, and the yoke 
of colonial bondage was forever thrown off. 

But another and more difficult task was still to be performed 
by them, without which all their previous toils and trials would 
have been worse than useless. The work of overthrow, separa- 
tion, independence, completed, the greater labor of building up 
a system of government for themselves remained, — a system 
which should render revolutions forever unnecessary, by esta- 
blishing law and order on the basis of the popular will constitu- 
tionally expressed. That labor, also, was performed. The Con- 
stitution was framed, adopted, and organized, and we and our 
fathers have lived under it for a little more than sixty-two years. 

Yes, fellow-citizens, we have reached a marked epoch in the 
history of our country. You have been reminded that it is just 
three quarters of a century since our independence was declared. 
But, if I mistake not, something of a mysterious significance 
has been attached to the precise age which our Constitution has 



THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION. 735 

now reached. A man in his sixty-third year is said to be at a 
critical period in his life. It is called his " grand climacteric.'^ 
If he safely passes over that period, he looks for a long continu- 
ance of life and health. And our Federal Constitution has at 
length reached its ^rand climacteric. And though differences of 
opinion may exist among us as to the exact amount of danger 
in which we have been involved, and as to the precise manner 
in which our controversies have been adjusted, nobody will deny 
that circumstances have occurred to mark the period through 
which we are passing, as a more than commonly critical period 
in our political existence. But, thanks to that Almighty Being 
who shapes our ends and controls our destinies, the shades 
which seemed gathering over our pathway are already scattered, 
the bow is clearly visible upon the clouds, and the sky above 
us is beginning to be once more radiant with the healing beams 
of a restored national concord ! 

Let us not indulge ourselves, however, in any hopes or in any 
fears, founded only on a superstitious tradition. Human life 
may have its mysterious periods of safety and of danger, and 
they may be altogether beyond our control. We know that it 
has one period, which no prudence can avert and no foresight 
postpone. We "cannot stay mortality's strong hand." The 
beloved Chief Magistrate who, this day last year, was engaged 
in adding another stone to the monument of his illustrious ex- 
emplar, was himself the subject of a monument before the expi- 
ration of a single week. And the patriotic hands and eloquent 
voices which are assisting this day in laying the corner-stone of 
a new Capitol, may have become motionless and mute before 
that structure shall have reached its completion. One after 
another, we must all meet "the inexorable hour." But not so 
with our country. There is no natural term to the life of a 
nation. It is for the people to say, as they rise up, generation 
after generation, to the enjoyment of the Institutions which 
their fathers have founded, whether, by God's blessing, they 
will transmit them unimpaired to their children. 

It is for us to say, whether we will be true to those great ele- 
ments of Free Government, to those noble principles of Liberty 
and Law, and to that blessed compact of Union, which our 
fathers have enshrined in the Constitution of the United States. 



736 THE AMERICAN REV0LUTI0I7. 

If we are but faithful to that great bond and bulwark of our 
Union, the ConstUuUon, critical periods may come and go — 
there may be grand climacterics and petty crises — stars may 
rise and set — the great and the good may fall on our right 
hand and our left — but the Country, the Country, will survive 
them all, — will survive us all, — and will stand before the world 
an imperishable monument of the patriotism of the sons, as 
well as of the wisdom and virtue of their sires. 

Let me conclude, then, by offering, as an expression of my 
best wishes for my country, on its seventy-fifth birthday, the fol- 
lowing sentiment : — 

" Permanent Peace with other countries ; fixed boundaries 
for our own country ; perpetuity to the Union of the States ; 
and a faithful fulfilment of the Constitutional Compact by all 
who are parties to it." 



EAILEOAD JUBILEE. 



A SPEECH DELIVERED AT THE PAVILIOX OX BOSTON COMMON AT THE 
CELEBRATION OP THE COMPLETION OF THE CANADA AND BOSTON RAIL- 
ROADS, SEPTEMBER 19, 1851. 



[In reply to a complimentary sentiment proposed by the Honorable John P. Bige- 
low, Mayor of the City.] 

I AM deeply sensible, Mr. Mayor, that the honors and compli- 
ments of this occasion belong to others. They belong, in the 
first place, as my friend, Mr. Everett, has just suggested, to the 
distinguished and illustrious strangers of our own country and 
of other countries, who have adorned our festival with their pre- 
sence. And they belong, in the next place, to those of our own 
fellow-citizens, of whom I see not a few around me, to whose 
far-seeing sagacity and persevering efforts and personal labors 
we owe the great works whose completion we celebrate. For 
myself. Sir, I have no pretension of either sort ; but I am all the 
more grateful for the opportunity you have afforded me of say- 
ing a few words, and for the kind and cordial manner in which 
you have presented me to this assembly. Most heartily do I 
wish that I could say any thing worthy of such a scene. Most 
heartily do I wish that I could find expressions and illustrations 
in any degree commensurate to the vast and varied theme which 
such an occasion suggests. And still more do I wish that I could 
find a voice capable of conveying, even to one half of this 
crowded and countless audience, such poor phrases as I may be 
able to command. But voice, language, and imagination seem 
to falter and fail alike, in any attempt to do justice to circum- 
stances like the present. 

62* 



738 RAILROAD JUBILEE. 

Mr. Mayor, the very dates which you have selected for your 
three days' jubilee, would furnish material for a discourse which 
would occupy far more than all the daylight which is left us. 
The 17th, 18th, and 19th days of September ! How many 
of the most memorable events in our local, colonial, and national 
history, are included in this brief period ! 

It was on one of these days, in the year 1620, that the Pilgrim 
Fathers of New England took their final departure from the 
mother country, their last and tearful leave of old England, and 
entered on that perilous ocean voyage, of more than three months' 
duration, which terminated at Plymouth Rock ! 

It was on one of these days, ten years later, in 1630, that the 
Puritan Fathers of Massachusetts, with one of whom you have 
done me the honor to associate me, first gave the name of Boston 
to the few tents and huts and log cabins which then made up 
our embryo city ! 

It was on one of these same days, too, in 1787, that the Pa- 
triot Fathers of America set their hands and seals, at Philadel- 
phia, to that matchless instrument of government — the Consti- 
tution of the United States -rv^hich has bound this nation to- 
gether for better or worse — let me not say for better or worse, 
but for the best and highest interests of our country and of 
mankind — in one inseparable and ever-blessed Union forever! 

Nor, Mr. Mayor, is this eventful period in the calendar with- 
out associations and reminiscences of pride and glory, for our 
brethren whom we have welcomed from over the borders. It 
was, if I mistake not, on one of these same three September 
days, in the year 1759, that the proud fortress of Quebec was 
finally surrendered to the British forces, — surrendered as the 
result of that memorable conflict on the heights of Abraham, 
five or six days before, in which the gallant Wolfe had expired 
in the blaze of his fame, happy (as he said) to have seen his 
country's arms victorious, — and in which the not less gallant 
Montcalm had lain down in the dust beside him, happy, too, 
(as he also said,) not to have seen the downfall of this last 
strong-hold of the French dominion on the North American 
continent. 

Nor is this a reminiscence, Sir, in which we of New England, 



RAILROAD JUBILEE. 739 

and of Massachusetts particularly, have no part or heritage ; for, 
let it not be forgotten that Massachusetts, during that year, 
besides furnishing to the British army her prescribed cfuota of 
six or seven thousand men to fight the battles of a common 
Crown, at Louisburg, in Nova Scotia, and elsewhere, actually 
raised three hundred additional men, at the request of General 
Wolfe himself, who served as the very pioneers of that seemingly 
desperate assault upon Quebec. Let it not be forgotten, either, 
that the Colonial Assembly of Massachusetts testified their ad- 
miration of Wolfe, and their sorrow for his loss, by voting a 
marble monument to his memory. 

But all these, I am aware, are but the accidental coincidences 
of this occasion. We have assembled, not to recall the past, 
but to rejoice in the present; not to commemorate the early 
trials and exploits of our fathers, but the mature achievements 
and proud successes of their sons. We come not to celebrate 
the triumphs of the forum or the battle-field, but the peaceful 
victories of science, of invention, and of those mechanic arts, so 
many of whose noble products, and nobler producers, we have 
seen in the splendid pageant of the day. 

And in whatever aspect we contemplate these great highways 
of intercommunication, in whose construction and completion 
we this day exult, we find it difficult to express, and impossible 
to exaggerate, our sense of their magnitude and importance. 
It is for others, and upon other occasions, to speak of their influ- 
ence on our material interests, our commercial prosperity, and 
our local advantages. 

Your own intelligent and accomplished Committee of Arrange- 
ments, indeed, have anticipated all that could be said by any 
one, on any occasion, on this part of the subject. They have 
prepared a tabular representation, which I am glad to see has 
been laid upon every plate, which tells in figures less deceptive 
or equivocal than those of rhetoric, how much has been done in 
this way for Boston, for Massachusetts, for New England, for 
the country, for the whole unbounded continent, by the enter- 
prise, industry, capital, and skill of our citizens. Here, too, is a 
miniature map, which they have furnished us, exhibiting our 
little Commonwealth, as it really is, covered all over with 



740 RAILllOAD JUBILEE. 

railroad lines, as with the countless fibres of a spider's web. 
They tell us here, Sir, of a hundred and twenty passenger 
trains, containing no less than twelve thousand persons, shooting 
into our city, on a single, ordinary, average, summer's day, with 
a regularity, punctuality, and precision, which make it almost as 
safe to set our watches by a railroad whistle, as by the Old South 
clock ! 

But, Sir, by what figures of rhetoric, or of arithmetic either, 
shall we measure the influence of those great improvements on 
our political condition, or on our social relations, domestic or 
foreign ? 

Consider them for an instant, in connection with the extent of 
our own wide-spread Republic. By what other agency than 
that of railroads could a Representative Government, like ours, 
be rendered practicable over so vast a territory ? The necessary 
limits of such a Government were justly defined by one of our 
earliest and wisest statesmen, to be those within which the 
Representatives of the People could be brought together with 
regularity and certainty, as often as needful, to transact the 
public business. 

And by which, do you think, Sir, of the old-fashioned modes 
of transportation or travel — the stage-coach, the pack-saddle, or 
the long wagon, — or by which, even, of those queer conveyances 
which his Excellency, the Governor-General of Canada,* tells us 
he once shared with my friend, Governor Paine, — could Dele- 
gates from California or Utah, or even from some of our less 
recent and less remote acquisitions, be brought to our sessions of 
Congress at Washington, and carried back at stated intervals to 
consult the wishes of their constituents, within any reasonable 
or reliable time ? 

Mr. Mayor, in view of this and many other considerations, to 
which I may not take up further time by alluding, and which, 
indeed, are too familiar to require any allusion, I feel that it is no 
exaggeration to say that our Railroad system is an essential part 
of our Representative system ; and that it has exerted an influ- 
ence, second in importance to no other that can be named, ma- 

* The Earl of Elgin, whose admirable speech on this occasion will be forgotten by 
no one who heard it. 



RAILROAD JUBILEE. 741 

terial, political, or moral, in binding together, in one indissoluble 
brotherhood, this vast association of American States. It is 
hardly too much to add, that it seems to have been Providentially 
prepared, as the great centripetal enginery, which is destined to 
overcome and neutralize forever those deplorable centrifugal ten- 
dencies, which, local differences, and peculiar institutions, and 
sectional controversies have too often ensfcndered. 

The President of the United States, in his admirable reply to 
your own most appropriate address, Sir, welcoming him within 
the lines of Boston, reminded us that his illustrious predecessor, 
Washington, occupied eleven days in travelling by express from 
Philadelphia to the neighboring city of Cambridge, in one of 
the most critical emergencies of our local history. Let me re- 
mind you, also, of a similar experience in the journey ings of 
another of his predecessors. In the recently-published diary 
of our own John Adams, will be found the following entry, 
dated at Middletown, Connecticut, on the 8th day of June, 1771 ; 

" Looking into the almanac, I am startled. Supreme Court 
at Ipswich the 18th day of June ; I thought it a week later? 
25th ; so that I have only next week to go home, one hundred 
and fifty miles. I must improve every moment. It is twenty- 
five miles a day, if I ride every day next week." 

John Adams startled, — and, let me say, he was not of a com- 
plexion to be very easily startled at any thing, — at having only 
a week for s^oin^ a hundred and fiftv miles! Startled at the 
idea of being obliged to go twenty-five miles a day every day 
for a week ! While here, but a moment since, was his illustri- 
ous successor, who, having already travelled nearly five hundred 
miles in twenty-four hours, and having spent three or four days 
in Newport and Boston, which we hope have been as delightful 
to him as they have been to us, is now on his way back, and is 
about to reach Washington again, before the week in which he 
left there is fairly at an end I 

And here, Mr. Mayor, I turn, in conclusion, to what to-day, at 
least, in the minds and hearts of us all, is the great charm of this 
modern miracle of rapid intercommunication. It is that it ena- 
bles us to see, to know, and to enjoy personal intercourse with 
the great, the good, the distinguished, the admired, of our own 



742 RAILROAD JUBILEE. 

land and of other lands. We can take them by the hand, we 
can see their faces, we can hear their voices, and we can form 
ties of mutual respect and regard, which neither time nor distance 
may afterwards sever. 

There have been those here to-day whom none of you will 
soon forget; and there is at least one of them to whom I had 
particularly proposed to myself the pleasure of alluding. I refer 
to the Secretary of the Interior, the Honorable Alexander Stuart, 
a noble son of old Virginia, with whom, in other years, I have 
been associated in Congress, and whom I am always proud to 
call my friend. He has already taken his leave of us. Sir; but 
I am sure we all desire to follow him with our good wishes, 
and to assure him, that though out of sight he is not out of mind. 

But let me congratulate the company that we have another 
Alexander Stewart still left at the table — a distinguished son of 
Nova Scotia — an eminent citizen of Halifax — a high func- 
tionary of the Provincial Government — whom it has been my 
good fortune to have at my side during the last hour, and who 
is every way entitled to our highest consideration and respect. 
With a view of introducing him to the company, I propose, as 
a sentiment, — 

" Prosperity to Nova Scotia and the City of Halifax, and the 
health of our distinguished guest, the Honorable Alexander 
Stewart, the Master of the Rolls." 



AGRICULTURE. 

A SPEECH DELIVEUED AT THE DINNER OF THE MIDDLESEX AGRICULTUEAL 
SOCIETY, AT LOWELL, OCTOBER 24, 1831. 



[In reply to a complimeutaiy toast by the President of the Society, the Honorable 
E. R. Hoar.] 

I AM greatly obliged, Mr. President, by the friendly manner in 
which you have presented my name to the company, and greatly 
honored by the cordial reception they have given to it. I have 
come here, as you know, at the invitation of the Middlesex A^ri- 
cultural Society, rriost kindly communicated by yourself, as their 
President, to witness their cattle show and ploughing match, and 
to listen to the lessons of experience and the words of exhort- 
ation which might be addressed to them by my excellent and 
able friend, Mr. Child. 

Let me add, that as one of the Trustees of the Massachusetts 
Agricultural Society, and one of its delegates to the State Agri- 
cultural Board, I hardly felt at liberty to neglect such an oppor- 
tunity of observing the progress of agricultural improvement in 
this good old County of Middlesex ; a County which abounds 
alike in the memorials of a glorious past, and in the evidence 
of a prosperous present ; whose soil is enriched with the best 
blood of the fathers, and adorned with the noblest institutions of 
their sons; and which, in the person and example of its own 
Prescott, leading on his patriot band at Bunker Hill in a farmer's 
frock, gave a pledge and an earnest, that no degree of devotion 
to agricultural pursuits, or to any other material interests, would 
ever interfere with the readiness and the resolution of its citizens, 
to do their full share in maintaining and vindicating the rights 
and liberties of their country. 



744 AGRICULTURE. 

I need not assure you, Mr. President, that I have been greatly 
gratified and delighted by all that I have seen, and all that I have 
heard, here to-day. I only wish that it were in my power to 
contribute any thing, in return, to the instruction, or even to the 
entertainment, of this assembly. But " silver and gold have I 
none." I have no rich crojjs to tell you of, no fat cattle to 
describe, no new theories of the potato rot to propose; and the 
most that I can do, is to express, in a few unpretending words, 
the deep interest which I cannot fail to feel, as a humble mem- 
ber of the community, in whatever relates to the improved cul- 
tivation of the soil, and still more to the improved condition of 
all who are concerned in it. 

It would be quite superfluous. Sir, for me, or for any one, to 
say a syllable, on such an occasion as this, as to the importance 
of agricultural pursuits. It is enough for us all to remember, 
as I am sure we all have remembered while we have partaken 
of this substantial repast, that it is agriculture, which supplies 
the table at which the whole human family are fed ; that it is 
agriculture, which is the appointed minister, the chosen hand- 
maid, of our Heavenly Parent, in His gracious response to our 
morning prayer, that He will " give us this day our daily bread." 

And even more superfluous would it be to speak of agricul- 
ture as an honorable occupation, and one worthy the attention 
and pursuit of the most intelligent and enlightened among us. 
To say nothing of other countries, or of other ages, or of other 
men, what higher testimony could be borne to the honorable 
character of any human occupation, than to say that it was the 
favorite occupation of Washington, — the pursuit which he ex- 
changed with regret even for the highest honors of the Republic, 
and to which he returned with eagerness at the earliest moment 
of his retirement from public service. Washington, Sir, is 
known to us by many titles — as the General of our armies, the 
President of our Republic, the Saviour of his country — and 
there is really no title too good, or even good enough, to bear his 
name company. But there is none under which that name will 
be longer remembered, or more gratefully cherished by posterity, 
none with which he himself would have been more proud to have 
it associated, than that of the Farmer of Mount Vernon. 



1^ 



AGRICULTURE. 745 

But, Mr. President, I am not here to flatter the farmers. And 
if I desired to do so, it would be rather a dangerous experiment 
at a moment when we are within ear-shot of so many of our 
fellow-citizens who are engaged in other pursuits. I shall not 
say to them, as the old Roman poet said, that, when Justice 
winged its flight from the earth, it made its latest abode, and left 
its last traces, among the homes and in the hearts of the hus- 
bandmen. For, I cannot forget, that that noble Association of 
Massachusetts mechanics, for which my friend, Mr. Lincoln, has 
just responded, and of which I enjoy the cherished distinction of 
being an honorary member, adopted long ago for its motto « Be 
just and fear not ; " and I believe there is no body of men in the 
land, who more scrupulously " reck their own rede," and practise 
according to their own precepts. 

Nor shall I tell the farmers, as they have been told from high 
quarters, in more recent days, that they are the " best part of the 
population;" for I know they would scorn any compliment 
which should be paid them at the expense of their brethren in 
other pursuits. It is enough for us all to admit that there is no 
better part of the population, unless, indeed, it be their own 
wives and daughters, as represented in yonder group, whose pri- 
vilege is always to be styled, "the better part of creation." 
There are none better entitled, certainly, to the respect and 
confidence of the community, or to the protecting and foster- 
ing care of the government of the country. And let me add. 
Sir, that if the farmers do not receive their full share of this 
governmental care and protection, it is their own fault; for 
though our friend, Mr. Child, has clearly proved to us that 
they do not constitute the most numerous class in our own State, 
they are unquestionably in a great majority in the country at 
large, and can have their own way, whenever they see fit to 
assert their power and vindicate their rights. 

Mr. President, I would gladly have said a more serious word, 
before taking my seat, in reference to the importance of some 
provision being made, either by the liberality of individuals, or 
under the patronage of the State, for the promotion of agricul- 
tural education, and the diffusion of agricultural science. But 
the sound of the car-bell is already in my ears, reminding me 

63 



746 AGRICULTURE. 

that in a few minutes more I must be on my way to Boston. 
You have your own engagements, too, the distribution of prizes, 
the election of officers, and other interesting and important duties, 
with which I would be the last to interfere. 1 cannot conclude, 
however, without adverting more particularly to the fact that 
this is not a mere agricultural occasion. 

There is something of peculiar and most agreeable signifi- 
cance both in the title of your Association, and in the time, 
place, and circumstances of your festival. You are a society of 
Husbandmen and Manufacturers, and you have chosen as the 
scene of your cattle-show the very site and seat of our largest 
and most numerous manufacturing establishments ; while the 
Mechanic Association of the county has prepared a beautiful 
exhibition, crowded with every variety of curious machine and 
ingenious implement and exquisite fabric, and is uniting with 
you in all your arrangements and festivities. Horticulture, too, 
has lent its choicest fruits and its richest garlands to the occa- 
sion. And, above all, a good Providence has shed the selectest 
influences on the hour, by favoring us so unexpectedly with a 
day of such unsurpassed loveliness and brilliancy. 

The whole occasion. Sir, furnishes a striking and beautiful 
testimony, on the part of those who understand the matter best, 
to the union and harmony of interests, which ought to exist, and 
which do exist, among all the different branches of human labor. 
It furnishes a noble refutation and rebuke to the idea, too often 
propagated for mischievous purposes, that there is an antagonism 
of interest or of feeling between the agricultural and manufac- 
turing population of the country, and especially between the 
farmers and mechanics of our own State. It declares, in a 
voice not to be misinterpreted, that the interests of labor are one 
and the same, in whatever departments it is employed ; and that 
the industrial classes, instead of thriving at each other's expense, 
find their highest interest and advantage in each other's prosper- 
ity. The greatest division of labor — the greatest union among 
laborers — this is the lesson of the scene before us, and I hope it 
will not soon be forgotten. It cannot be forgotten. Sir, by the 
farmers at least, while the mechanic arts are providing such 
implements for agriculture, as those to which you have already 



AGRICULTURE. 747 

alluded, — the Massachusetts Plough and the Virginia Reaper, 
which have recently carried off the prizes at the World's Fair, 
and given new celebrity to American invention and Yankee skill ; 
and which, let me add, are remembered by us not the less grate- 
fully to-day, as having associated in the triumphs of modern art, 
those two ancient Commonwealths, which were so closely and so 
gloriously associated in the early struggles of American Independ- 
ence. Nor will agriculture forget its indebtedness to invention 
and the mechanic arts, while it is in the enjoyment of those noble 
highways of intericommunication whose completion we have just 
celebrated, and which have brought the markets of Canada 
home to our very doors. Why, I have heard. Sir, within a few 
hours past, that since the opening of these roads, during the last 
week, one of your Middlesex farmers has found a ready sale for 
thirty or forty bushels of fresh peaches in the city of Montreal I 

But, Mr. President, I am admonished that these railroads are 
like the wind and tide in at least one respect — "they wait for 
no man," — and I hasten to secure my own passage, as well as 
to relieve your patience, by proposing as a sentiment, as I most 
cordially do, — 

" Success to the Farmers, Manufacturers, and Mechanics of 
Middlesex, and may they ever continue to cherish and cultivate 
those feelings of mutual respect and fraternal regard, which have 
united them to-day in a common and brilliant Festival." 



THE MECHANIC ARTS. 

A SPEECH DELIVERED AT THE FESTIVAL OF THE MASSACHUSETTS CHARI- 
TABLE MECHANIC ASSOCIATION, IN FANEUIL HALL, ON WEDNESDAY 
EVENING, OCTOBER 1, 1S51. 



[In reply to a complimentary call from George G. Smith, Esq., the Chief Marshal of 
the occasion.] 

I COULD have wished, Mr. Chief Marshal, that your worthy 
Vice-President, whose privilege it is to preside over the neigh- 
boring Observatory, as well as over this Association to-night, 
and who has so long been a living Bond * between science and 
art, might have brought some star of larger magnitude than 
myself within the range of his glass at this moment, and have 
allowed me to remain still longer unobserved. But we all know 
that there is no escape from his telescope, and I willingly yield 
myself .to his summons, as kindly announced by yourself. 

I thank you most heartily, ladies and gentlemen, for this 
friendly reception. I thank you still more for the opportunity of 
enjoying this most agreeable occasion. I have often, in other 
years, attended your festivals as a guest, and always with re- 
newed gratification. But you must pardon me, if I cannot con- 
sent to be considered as a mere guest this evening; for, since 
you have accorded me the distinction of being enrolled among 
your honorary members, I feel emboldened to assert my privi- 
leges as a brother. A most unworthy and unprofitable brother, 
I do confess, and little better than a drone in your industrial 
hive ; but one, who is all the more deeply grateful for your libe- 
rality, in allowing him to come in for a share of your honey, 
and especially in admitting him to-night to join with you in 
doing homage to your Queen Bees. 

* Mr. Bond, the Cambridge Astronomer, tlic Vice-President of the Association, 
occupied the Chair. 



THE MECHANIC ARTS. 749 

And never was there a moment, Mr. President, in tlic history 
of mankind, when any one might be more justly proud to find 
his name on the rolls of a Mechanic Association. Never, cer- 
tainly, was there a year when the inventors and artisans of the 
world could hold up their heads with a loftier consciousness of 
their importance to their fellow-men, than they may in this year 
of our Lord, 1851. Wherever we turn, at home or abroad, we 
see the strong hand of the mechanic, aided and guided by science, 
impressing itself upon the condition of society, and giving form 
and character to the age in which we live. As it was in the 
procession of the late Railroad Jubilee here in our own streets, 
to which the Mayor has so happily alluded, — so is it everywhere 
in the great procession of human events, as we see it passing 
along over the highways of human existence, and on the stage 
of daily life ; — the emblems of the trades, the insignia of the arts, 
the triumphal banners of mechanic labor and invention, are the 
chief features of the scene, and furnish its most striking and 
attractive ornaments. 

The highest praise has been awarded from all quarters to 
Prince Albert, of Old England, for proposing and patronizing 
the noble scheme, which has been so successfully and brilliantly 
carried out, of an exhibition of the industry of the world, ana 
there is no one here who would detract one jot or tittle from the 
credit which belongs to him. But, after all. Sir, he has only 
recognized the grand fact of the times. He has only made a sea- 
sonable and just acknowledgment of that which could no longer 
be denied. The Crystal Palace, (as was truly said by the Earl 
of Carlisle, so well and so favorably known to us all as Lord 
Morpeth,) is only " the formal recognition of the dignity and 
value of labor." But that dignity and that value existed, whether 
they were formally recognized or not. They did not wait for the 
breath of princes to call them into being, nor require a World's 
Fair for their blazonry. They were created by no royal patent, 
and made manifest by no crystal palace. By the strength of 
millions of stout arms, by the energy of millions of intelligent 
minds, and by the countless products which industry, invention, 
science, and skill, have brought to the advancement of civiliza- 
tion and the improvement of society, they have forced them- 
es* 



/ 



750 THE MECHANIC ARTS. 

selves upon the attention, the acknowledgment, and the admira- 
tion of the world. They have asserted their own title, and made 
their own way, to the recognition and respect of mankind. 

Sir, I am not about to detain this brilliant assembly from the 
pleasures which await them, by any detailed remarks about the 
World's Fair, or about our own particular section of it. You 
have heard already, to your hearts' content, of Stevens's Yacht, 
and Colt's Revolver, and Maynard's Primer, and Palmer's 
Wooden Leg, and Prouty's Plough, and McCormick's Reaper, — 
which may literally be said to have made the farmers of Old 
England " acknowledge the corn," — and of that marvellous lock 
of our own Boston Hobbs, who seems to have settled the point, 
that if Love ever laughs at locksmiths again, it will not be at 
Yankee locksmiths. You have all heard, too, of that frank admis- 
sion of the London Times, " that every practical success of the 
season belongs to the Americans." We may well be content 
with such compliments from such sources. We need have no 
fear after this, that " those who live in glass houses will throw 
stones " again in this direction. We can afford to adopt the 
language of the wise man, "let another praise thee, and not 
thine own mouth ; a stranger, and not thine own lips." 

W^e can aftbrd to do more, Mr. President; we can afford to 
acknowledge our own deficiencies. We can afford to admit, as, 
indeed, we cannot help admitting, that notwithstanding so many 
notable successes and triumphs in these practical machines and 
implements of industry, our manufactures and our mechanic 
arts are still greatly inferior to those of the old world, both in the 
quantity and quality of great varieties of products. And how 
could it be otherwise ? Why, Sir, for young republican Ame- 
rica to have gone out to a contest with the old world, in the arts 
which depend on long experience, consummate skill, and accu- 
mulated capital, and which have required royal courts and 
princely establishments for their existence and patronage else- 
where, would have been simply ridiculous. For her to have 
come off victorious in such a contest, would have equalled the 
triumph of the stripling of Israel, with his sling and his stone, 
over the giant of Gath, with the staff of his spear like a wea- 
ver's beam. It would have been more than human. 



THE MECHANIC ARTS. 751 

But let me ask, Sir, who of us is sorry thatwc arc bciiiiul, I'ar 
behind, the old world in articles of mere taste and ornainont ? 
Who does not rejoice that we cannot vie with Europe and Asia 
in arts that minister only to the lust of the eye, and the pride of 
life ? Who is in haste to see the day, when the tissues and 
tapestries, the jewels and porcelain of India or of France, shall 
be native to our own land? Who, on the contrary, docs not 
desire that such a consummation may be postponed, until that 
double problem shall be solved, of which the history of mankind 
as yet affords no solution, — first, how these sumptuous and 
gorgeous decorations of the rich can be fabricated, without the 
degradation and debasement of the poor; and second, how the 
morality and purity, which are the very vital air of republican 
liberty, can withstand the fascinations and blandishments of a 
corrupting and cankering luxury. 

And this leads me to say, Mr. President, in a single concluding 
sentence, that there is at least one element wanting in that great 
exhibition, for the purposes of any just comparison between our 
own and other countries. We see there the products ; but we 
do not see the producers. We see there the fabrics ; but we do 
not see the hands which made them. Sir, if it had been possi- 
ble to exhibit in any tangible shape, or by any personal represent- 
ation, the real condition of the artisans and mechanics of the 
world ; if the makers of every article could have been seen stand- 
ing by their work, with their ordinary dress on their back, with 
their ordinary food at their side, and with all the advantages or 
disadvantages of their relative condition fully developed and 
displayed, — their intelligence, their education, their wages, the 
amount of individual comfort, independence, and happiness they 
enjoy, — the whole moral, social, and political position which 
they occupy, — what contrasts would not have been witnessed ! 
If this very hall, with all that it now contains, could be wafted 
over the waters by a wish, on some magic carpet, like that 
described in one of the tales of the Arabian Nights, — if it 
could be set down safely in that much-talked-of " vacant space " 
in the American section of the Crystal Palace, — and if your 
excellent President,* now there, could be on the spot to meet you 

* Jonas Chickering. Esq. 



752 THE MECHANIC ARTS. 

as you alight, and to say to the assembled throng of visitors : 
" Here are the American mechanics — here are the men who 
build our ships, our houses, our bridges, and our railroads — who 
make our iron ware, and tin ware, and brass ware, and wooden 
ware, and who construct those wonderful machines and invent 
those curious implements to which you have given your prizes — 
and here, too, are their wives and daughters; — behold them, 
and compare them with your own," — would they not all feel 
that it was something better than a vainglorious boast for us 
to exclaim, — 

" JIan is the nobler plant our realm supplies, 
And souls are ripened in these northern skies ! " 



AGPJCULTUEAL EDU( ATION. 



A SPEECH DELIVERED AT THE DINNER OF THE HAMPSHIRE, HAMPDEN, 
AND FRANKLIN AGRICULTURAL SOCIETY, AT NORTUAMl'TON, OCTOBER 
9, 1851. 



[In reply to a complimentap toast proposed by "W. 0. Gorliam. Esq., the Secretary 
of the Society.] 

I NEED not assure you, Mr. President, how deeply I am in- 
debted to your eloquent Secretary, for so kind and compliment- 
ary an introduction to the yeomanry of old Hampshire. I am 
not — at least, I hope I am not — altogether a stranger to them. 
I have visited their lovely valley, and climbed their beautiful hill- 
sides, in other years. I have made the personal acquaintance of 
many of them, on other occasions and amid other scenes. With 
not a few of them, as yoxi well remember, I was associated long 
ago in the Legislature of our own Commonwealth. "With more 
than one of them I have been more recently and more closely 
connected in the councils of the nation. Wherever I have met 
them, I have found them true men, trusty counsellors, patriotic 
citizens, faithful and cherished friends. I rejoice to recognize so 
many of them before me at this moment, and to have such an 
opportunity of renewing the assurances of our mutual regard 
and respect. I rejoice to see them on their own ground, in the 
midst of their fellow-citizens, with their wives and daughters by 
their side, and surrounded by so many evidences, both of imme- 
diate enjoyment, and of permanent prosperity and happiness. 

Sir, it has been my fortune to be born and bred in a city ; and 
I am not insensible to the advantages which are to be found in 
the varied institutions, in the compact neighborhoods, and in 



754 AGRICULTURAL EDUCATION. 

the general movement and activity of a large and wealthy me- 
tropolis. I never, certainly, can find it in my heart to regret my 
relations to Boston. I am bound to her by a thousand ties of 
old association, of present interest, and of personal obligation. 
But never yet have I found myself on the hills or the plains which 
lie along the courses of your charming river, without feeling that 
your lot, above that of almost all other INIassachusetts men, has 
been cast in pleasant places, and that you have, indeed, a goodly 
heritage. 

Certainly, Sir, if there be a spot on our not over-fertile New 
England soil, if there be a spot beneath our not always clement 
New England sky, on which a man may find a more than ordi- 
nary security for the enjoyment of health and happiness, of com- 
petency and comfort, of contentment and independence, of vigor 
of body and vigor of mind, it must be so'mewhere along these 
verdant meadows, or upon these sunny slopes of the Connecticut ; 
it must be somewhere among these " banks and braes of your 
Bonnie Doon." And, let me add, if there be a spot beneath the 
sun, where vu-tue, and piety, and integrity, and patriotism, have 
already found some of their brightest examples and purest 
models, it is here, amid the homes of your Stoddards and 
Edwardses, your Williamses, and Hawleys, and Strongs. 

But, Mr. President and Gentlemen, you are not here to listen 
to empty compliments to the beauties of your scenery, the ad- 
vantages of your condition, or the character of your distinguished 
men, dead or living. This is a farmers' festival ; and having 
gone through with the exhibitions and competitions of the day, 
you have come together for a friendly interchange of opinions, 
and a frank comparison of views, on the great subject of agri- 
culture. And a great subject it certainly is, and one worthy of 
the most careful examination and study of our ablest and most 
enlightened minds. Nay, Sir, it demands such examination and 
study, and it must have them, unless we are willing that our 
posterity shall reap the bitter fruits of our ignorance and neglect, 
and shall have nothing else to reap. 

For myself, I have little pretension, I am conscious — no man 
here has less — to give advice, or pronounce an opinion, upon 
any question pertaining to the practical cultivation of the soil. 



AGRICULTURAL EDUCATION. 755 

If I were called upon, at this moment, certainly, to put my hand 
to the plough, I am sensible that I should stand greatly in need 
of Prouty's No. 40, which has recently obtained the premium at 
the World's Fair, and which the Chairman of one of your Com- 
mittees has described to us, this morning, as being made " to go 
alone." But I have been deeply impressed with some of the 
views which have been presented on this occasion, and on other 
occasions, by the experienced and scientific gentleman * who has 
addressed us at the church this morning, and I cannot forbear 
giving utterance to one or two of those impressions, in a few 
plain and unpretending remarks. 

No one, I am sure, who examined the Agricultural Report, 
which was issued from the Patent Office at Washington, last 
year, could fail to have been struck with the suggestions it con- 
tained in regard to the gradual deterioration and impoverishment 
of the American soil. No one can have forgotten the idea, so 
forcibly presented by the author of that Report, — that, for want 
of more system and more science in the cultivation of our lands, 
we are rapidly exhausting the soil of its productive qualities, 
and are in danger of leaving it to those who come after us, des- 
titute of all those ingredients and elements upon which they must 
rely for bread. 

I fear. Sir, that we have all been too long accustomed to think 
of the soil we cultivate, as an imperishable and indestructible 
thing. And it is true, that by no acts and by no omissions of 
ours can we annihilate the solid ground beneath our feet, or 
remove from its strong foundations the sure and firm-set earth 
which we inhabit. It is true that the same hills and valleys, 
the same mountains and plains, which are before us and around 
us now, will remain fixed and steadfast long after we are buried 
in their dust, and will be trodden by generation after generation 
of our successors. But it is not less true, that the productive 
elements of the soil are as perishable as the plants and fruits to 
which they give life and nourishment. It is not less true, that 
the fertilizing ingredients of the earth stand as much in need of 
renewal as the seeds of our annual harvests ; and that unless 
we pay back to the ground, seasonably and punctually, the full 

* Dr. Dauiel Lee. of the United States Patent Office. 



756 AGRICULTURAL EDUCATION. 

amount that we draw from it, there will be a fearful accumu- 
lation of arrears to be settled by our posterity. 

Our neglect cannot, indeed, change the substantial forms of 
nature. We cannot dissolve the Sugar-Loaf. We cannot shake 
Mount Tom and Mount Holyoke from their rocky thrones, and 
remove them into the sea or the river. But we can destroy their 
verdure and strip them of their foliage. We can make their 
glorious beauty a fading flower, and leave them, and the valleys 
below them, so exhausted of their natural elements of produc- 
tion and fertility, that when our children go to them for bread, 
they shall only find a stone. 

Why, Mr. President, it has been estimated by your able ora- 
tor, that it would require, in round numbers, not less than 
a thousand millions of dollars, judiciously expended, to re- 
store to that richness of mould and strength of fertility which 
they originally possessed, the one hundred millions of acres of 
land in this country, which have already been partially exhausted ! 
And how can we ever speak of our farms as being free from 
mortgage, or our country from a national debt, while such a 
state of things exists, and is going on ! 

Sir, if there be truth, or any approximation to truth, in this 
calculation, how vastly important has it not become, that our 
agriculture should henceforth be conducted on more scientific 
and systematic principles ! How vastly important has it not 
become, as an act of sheer justice to our children and our child- 
ren's children, and lest they should rise up in judgment against 
us, as having robbed them of their rightful inheritance, that the 
practical farmers of our land should be instructed, should instruct 
themselves, should in some way or other become informed, as to 
the true nature of the soil they cultivate, and should learn by what 
processes and appliances, by what manures and fertilizers, it may 
be kept in a condition — not merely for furnishing food for them- 
selves — but for supporting that long succession of generations 
which, we hope and believe, are destined, by God's blessing, to 
maintain for a thousand years to come, a populous, and prosper- 
ous, and glorious Commonwealth, on the very spot on which it 
was first founded by our fathers. 

" Plant for posterity," was the saying of the old Roman phi- 



AGEICULTURAL EDUCATION. 757 

losopher and patriot, when he was setting out trees at eighty 
years of age. And there is something delightful in the idea of 
our children sporting in their childhood, and reposing in their 
old age, beneath the spreading branches which our hands have 
reared for them. But "manure for posterity" may well be the 
more homely, but far more important maxim of the provident 
and patriotic farmers of the present day. In feeding your child- 
ren, take care that you are not starving your grandchildren. 
Let every landlord, every proprietor of acres, remember and 
realize, that though the fee-simple of his farm is in himself, and 
though no court of law or court of equity can sustain an action 
against him for strip or waste, he yet holds the soil in strict 
moral trust, and is accountable in the eyes of men, and at the 
bar of God, for the degree of fertility or barrenness which he 
may bequeath to his descendants. 

And most especially, Mr. President, is such a sense of obliga- 
tion and responsibility needed in our own Commonwealth. In 
other and newer and larger States, there may be less immediate 
call for such precautions. They have a richer original soil to 
draw upon, and much of it is still a virgin soil. They have a 
greater extent of territory to expatiate in and experiment upon. 
They may go on cropping from acre to acre, like bees from 
flower to flower. If they exhaust their farms to-day, to-morrow 
they may repair "to fresh fields and pastures new." One may 
almost apply to them the language of one of those charming 
melodies of Moore's, so familiar, I doubt not, to many of my fair 
hearers — 

" They may roam tliro" this world, like a child at a feast, 
Who but sips of a sweet, and then flies to the rest : 
And when pleasure begins to grow dull iu the East, 
They may order their wings and be off to the West." 

But we have no such ample territory or luxuriant soil. We 
are one of the oldest, and one of the smallest States in the Union. 
Our lands are limited in extent, and more limited in fertility. 
Poor at the outset, they have been long under the plough. And 
unless intelligence and science shall do something, and some- 
thing seasonable and effective, to supply the deficiencies of 
nature, and an-est the progress of exhaustion, we shall leave little 

64 



758 AGRICULTURAL EDUCATION. 

but desolation and destitution to our descendants, so far, at 
least, as our own agriculture is concerned. 

Our commerce may continue to extend itself, and to spread its 
wings over every sea ; our manufactures and mechanic arts may 
flourish and thrive ; our population may have bread enough and 
to spare — purchased in exchange for the profits of other pur- 
suits. But if we mean to retain within our borders a prosper- 
ous and numerous agricultural class, an intelligent, independ- 
ent, and virtuous rural population — 

"A bold yeomanry, their country's pride, 
Which once destroyed, can never be supplied," 

(and Heaven forbid that we should ever be without one I) we 
must take good care to hand down our soil as well as our insti- 
tutions — to transmit our lands as well as our liberties — unim- 
paired to posterity. 

It is in view of considerations like these, Mr. President, that I 
rejoice to observe that the attention of our Legislature, and of 
our people, has recently been awakened to the subject of agri- 
cultural education. We have already a noble system of public 
schools, of which the farmers enjoy their full share of the advan- 
tages, and which is amply adequate to the primary preparation 
of our children for all the various professions and pursuits of 
life. Forever blessed be the memory of our Fathers for this in- 
estimable legacy ! 

Other nations may boast of their magnificent gems and 
monster diamonds. Our Kohinoor is our Common School Sys- 
tem. This is our " JMountain of Light," — not snatched, indeed, 
as a prize fi-om a barbarous foe, nor destined to deck a royal 
brow, or to irradiate a Crystal Palace ; but whose pure and pene- 
trating ray illumines every brow, and enlightens every mind, and 
cheers every heart and every hearthstone in the land, and which 
supplies, from its exhaustless mines, " ornaments of grace unto 
the head, and chains upon the neck," of every son and daughter 
of Massachusetts I 

But while we cherish our common schools, as now established, 
as our proudest and richest heritage, it cannot be doubted that 
our young farmers may be, and should be, provided, in some 



AGRICULTURAL EDUCATION. 759 

other and supplementary way, with the opportunity of accpiirinfj 
knowledge and science more immediately pertaining to tlieir 
particular sphere of labor ; though whether this is to be done by 
independent agricultural schools and colleges, like those existing 
in many parts of Europe, and recently described to us by your 
own accomplished Hitchcock, or by ingrafting a system of agri- 
cultural education upon the schools and colleges which we 
already have, it is for those wiser than myself to decide. 

Mr. President, I may not pursue this topic further. I may not 
trespass longer on the attention of this most intelligent and 
agreeable company. I said, in rising to address you, that I was 
glad to meet here to-day, so many of my old friends of the River 
Counties. I cannot forget, in concluding, that there are some of 
them whom I do not meet, and whom I shall meet no more on 
earth. There are two of them especially, whose familiar forms 
have presented themselves to my mind's eye more than once on 
this occasion, and whose memories, in all our hearts, are as green 
as the sod which covers them. 

The one, in the prime of life, with the purple light of youth 
still lingering upon his cheek, " the expectancy and rose of the 
fair State," who left no superior at the bar of his own County, 
and who would have found few equals in the halls of Congress, 
to which he had been summoned. The other, on the verge of 
old age, but whose eye was not yet dimmed, nor his natural 
strength abated, whose cordial grasp and sunny smile will never 
be forgotten by those who have shared them, and whose hoary 
locks, so long the ornament of the Senate Chamber, only lent 
a deeper impressiveness to the words of sober wisdom and of 
ardent patriotism, to which he so often and so eloquently gave 
utterance. 

Allow me, in taking my seat, to propose to you, — 

The memory of James C. Alvord, and of Isaac C. Bates. 



MASSACHUSETTS IN 1775. 

A SPEECH DELIVERED AT THE CELEBRATION OF THE COMPLETION OF A 
MONUMENT, ERECTED BY ORDER OF THE LEGISLATURE OF MASSACHU- 
SETTS, TO ISAAC DAVIS, ABNER HOSMER, AND JAMES HAYWARD, AT 
ACTON, OCTOBER 29, 1S51. 



[In reply to a complimentary call from the President of the day, Eev. James T. 
Woodbury.] 

I COULD have wished, Mr. President, that this call might have 
been postponed to a later period of the festival, or that, at least, 
I might have been spared from attempting to speak, until the 
clatter of plates within, and the noise of drums without, had in 
some measure subsided. But I suppose that one who has just 
looked on the bones of Isaac Davis, must not permit himself to 
shrink from any service which may be assigned him. And 
indeed, Sir, I am deeply indebted to your Committee of Arrange- 
ments for the privilege of being present at all on this occasion, 
and for the opportunity they have afforded me of witnessing 
the impressive ceremonies of this morning, and of listening to 
the instructive and eloquent address of His Excellency the 
Governor. 

Sir, we have had many celebrations and jubilees of late in 
this part of the country, and it has been my fortune to be present 
at not a few of them. But, though comparisons are sometimes 
odious, I can safely and sincerely say that there has been none, 
none among them all, which has seemed to me so peculiarly 
congenial to the spirit of our republican institutions, so emi- 
nently characteristic of the American people and of American 
principles, as that in which we are now engaged. 



MASSACHUSETTS IN 1775. 761 

We are here, Mr. President, for what? Not to inaugurate the 
opening of some magnificent liighway of internal communica- 
tion. Not to display the rich trophies of agricultural or horti- 
cultural industry and skill. Not to celebrate the almost miracu- 
lous triumphs of modern mechanic art and invention. Not to 
offer the homage of our hearts, or the hospitalities of our homes, 
to some popular Chief Magistrate of our own Republic, or of a 
neighboring Colony. No, Sir; no. All these things have been 
attended to elsewhere. In the crowded cities, in the larger 
towns, they have been done, and well done. And it was fit they 
should be done ; and many of them have been attended with a 
more costly ceremonial, with a more gorgeous pageant, with 
more of outside pomp and circumstance, than have been witnessed 
on this occasion. 

But these are not the objects which have broken the ordinary 
stillness of this quiet, rural neighborhood. These are not the 
objects which have summoned to this retired spot such masses 
of the people of Middlesex, and of Massachusetts generally, in 
all their various capacities of magistrate, and citizen, and citizen- 
soldier, and which have engaged and engrossed all our minds 
and all our hearts to-day. Not for the present, not for the living, 
not for those who are, or ever have been, high in place, exalted 
in rank, powerful in influence, have these memorials been pre- 
pared, and these libations poured out. We have assembled, on 
the contrary, to pay a grateful, though a tardy tribute, to the 
memory of three humble citizens of one of the smallest towns 
in the State, two of them privates in a militia company, and the 
third with no higher title than that of a captain, whose simple 
story is that they laid down their lives, seventy-six years ago, in 
defence of American Liberty. 

I need not say, Sir, that such an example of rendering honor 
to the memory of the humblest officers and the common soldiers 
of our Revolutionary Militia, is in beautiful harmony with the 
spirit of republican equality which pervades our institutions, and 
is better calculated than all the bounties and bonuses and land 
scrip, which can be voted by the most liberal or the most prodi- 
gal Congress, to raise up defenders for those institutions, — where 
alone they must be looked for in time of need, — among the 



64* 



762 MASSACHUSETTS IN 1775. 

rank and file of the people. It gives an assurance which will 
not be forgotten, that, however it may be in the country church- 
yards of the old world, the "village Hampdens " and village 
Heroes of our own land will never want a stone to mark their 
grave, or an inscription to tell the tale of their prowess and their 
patriotism. 

But it would be quite unjust, Mr. President, to limit the inten- 
tion of this occasion to the precise object which has given rise 
to it. It has a larger and more comprehensive scope. We are 
here to commemorate, and to commend afresh to the admiration 
and imitation of our children, the patriotism and valor and self- 
devotion of the whole people of Massachusetts in 1775 — of all 
her citizens and of all her soldiers — militia-men, minute-men, 
and volunteers — as exemplified and illustrated on the 19th of 
April, in the persons of three of their number, to whom so early 
and so glorious a crown of martyrdom was assigned. 

Let me not seem to disparage the individual heroism of Isaac 
Davis, Abner Hosmer, and James Hay ward. Their names are 
upon yonder granite ; they are upon the scroll of history ; they 
are uppermost to-day upon the tablets of all our hearts. Few 
instances could be selected from the whole range of our Revolu- 
tionary records, of greater bravery and daring than those of these 
three noble men of Acton, But let us not forget the full force 
and import of that memorable exclamation of the gallant Davis 
himself, — " I have n't a man that 's afraid to go." Sir, that was 
a generous and a just exclamation. It was true, not only of his 
own Acton Company, which led the way so gallantly down to 
the old North Bridge, but it was true of the great mass of the 
common soldiers and of the common people of the State, whe- 
ther in town or country, in cities or in villages. Everywhere, in 
every county and district alike, throughout the whole length and 
breadth of the State, there was found the same resolute deter- 
mination to resist the tyranny of the mother country, even unto 
death. 

There were different manifestations of this spirit in different 
localities, and different individuals enjoyed different opportuni- 
ties of displaying it. In Boston, it exhibited itself in words and 
deeds of defiance towards Commissioners of Stamps and Com- 



MASSACHUSETTS IN 1775. 7G3 

missioners of Customs, towards royal Governors and a hireling 
garrison. There was Faneuil Ilall. There was the Ohl South. 
There was the Green Dragon. Tliere was the liiberty Tree. 
There was the Tea Party. There were Otis, and C^uincy, and 
Hancock, and Adams. There American Liberty was born and 
cradled. 

In Salem, it displayed itself in the brave, though bloodless resist- 
ance, offered to Colonel Leslie and the British troops, by Colonel 
Pickering and the minute-men of that region, on that memora- 
ble Sabbath afternoon, February 26, 1775 ; — a resistance which 
almost made the North Bridge of Essex as famous in our annals, 
as the North Bridge of Middlesex. There, as was said by the 
British journals at the time, the Americans first " hoisted the 
standard of Liberty." 

In Lexington and Concord, it manifested itself on the 19th 
day of April, in a sterner form and in less doubtful colors. There 
the first blood was shed. 

At Bunker Hill, on the 17th of June, it assumed a still sterner 
and fiercer front. There was the first challenge, the first defiance, 
the first intrenchment, the first general engagement with the 
British forces. There Prescott and Putnam fought, and AVarren 
fell. 

And, lastly, at Dorchester Heights, on the 17th of March, 1776, 
it presented itself in the more welcome shape of a vigorous and 
masterly movement, which settled the question of Liberty <fnce 
and for all, so far as Massachusetts soil was concerned, and made 
it free soil forever! There was the first success of Washington 
and the American cause, under the Union Flag. 

Thus, Mr. President, in all these different localities of the Old 
Bay State, something was done first ; the first word, the first 
blow, the first blood, the first redoubt, the first triumph. Each 
vied with the other in acts of heroism. Deep called unto deep, 
valley responded to valley, plain to plain, hill-top to hill-top. 
There were diversities of operations, but the same spirit ; the 
same calm, deliberate, fearless, unchangeable, and unconquerable 
spirit, of which the Acton Martyrs furnished so noble a type. 
In 1805, 1 think, Nelson's last signal at Trafalgar was, " England 
expects every man to do his duty." But thirty years before that. 



764 . MASSACHUSETTS IN 1775. 

in New England, every man did his duty. On that day, Massa- 
chusetts, certainly, might have said of her citizen soldiers, what 
your own Davis said of his company, — " I have n't a man that 's 
afraid to go." No, nor a woman, nor a child; for the spirit of 
Liberty pervaded all ages and sexes, and the patriot mothers of 
Massachusetts were alternately occupied in furnishing food and 
clothing for their husbands in the field, and in educating their 
children at home to a hatred of tyranny and oppression, and to 
an admiration of those who fought and bled in resisting it. 

Let me illustrate this idea, Mr. President, by relating to you 
one of the most interesting personal incidents which I can look 
back upon, in the course of a ten years' service in Congress. It 
was an intervie\y which I had with our late venerated fellow- 
citizen, John Quincy Adams, about five or six years ago. It 
was on the floor of the Capitol, not far from the spot where he 
soon afterwards fell. The House had adjourned one day, some- 
what suddenly and at an early hour, and it happened that after 
all the other members had left the hall, Mr. Adams and myself 
were left alone in our seats engaged in our private correspond- 
ence. Presently the messengers came in, rather unceremoniously, 
to clean up the hall, and began to wield that inexorable imple- 
ment, which is so often the plague of men, both under public 
and private roofs. Disturbed by the noise and dust, I observed 
Mr. Adams approaching me with an unfolded letter in his hands. 
'' D(f you know John Joseph Gurney ? " said he. " I know him 
well, Sir, by reputation ; but I did not have the pleasure of meet- 
ing him personally when he was in America." " Well, he has 
been writing me a letter, and I have been writing him an answer. 
He has been calling me to account for my course on the Oregon 
question ; and taking me to task for what he calls my belligerent 
spirit and warlike tone towards England. And I should like to 
read you what I have written in reply." 

And then "the old man eloquent" proceeded to read to me, 
so far as it was finished, one of the most interesting letters I ever 
read or heard in my life. It was a letter of autobiography, in 
which he described his parentage and early life, and in which he 
particularly alluded to the sources from which he derived his 
jealousy of CTreat Britain, and his readiness to resist her, even 



MASSACUUSETTS IN 1775. 705 

unto blood, whenever he thought that she was encroaching on 
American rights. He said that he was old enough in 1775, to 
understand what his father was about in those days, and lie 
described the lessons which his mother taught him, durin" his 
father's absence in attending the Congress of Independence. 
Every day, he said, after saying his prayers to God, he was 
required to repeat those exquisite stanzas of Collins, which he 
had carefully transcribed in his letter, and which he recited to 
me with an expression and an energy which I shall never forget, — 
the tears coursing down his cheelis, and his voice, every now 
and then, choked with emotion : — 

'■ How sleep the hravo, ■vvlio sink to rest, 
By all their eountry's wishes blest ! 
When Spriiif^, with dewy fingers cold, 
Eetiirus to deek their liallowd mould, 
She there shall dress a sweeter sod, 
Thau Fancy's feet have ever trod. 

By Faiiy hands their knell is rung. 
By forms unseen their dirge is simg ; 
There Honor comes, a pilgrim gray, 
To bless the turf that Avraps their elay. 
And Freedom shall awhile repair, 
To dwell a weeping hermit there." 

And there was another ode by the same author, which, he said, 
he was also obliged to repeat, as a part of this same morning 
exercise, — the ode, I believe, on the death of Colonel Charles 
Ross, in the action at Fontenoy, one verse of which, with a 
slight variation, would not be inapplicable to your own Davis : 

" By rapid Seheld's descending wave 
His country's vows shall bless the grave, 

Where'er the youth is laid : 
That sacred spot the village hind 
With every sweetest turf shall bind, 
And Peace protect the shade." 

Such, Sir, was the education of at least one of our Massachu- 
setts children at that day. And though I do not suppose that 
all the mothers of 1775 were like Mrs. Adams, yet the great 
majority of them, we all know, had as much piety and patriot- 



7G6 MASSACHUSETTS IN 1775. 

ism, if not as much poetry, in their composition, and their child- 
ren were brought up at once in the nurture and admonition of 
the Lord and of Liberty. 

Indeed, Sir, I have at my side, at this instant, a living illustra- 
tion of the fact. Here is my venerable friend. Dr. Walton, of 
Pepperell, who has come over here to celebrate his eighty-first 
birthday, and who has just told me, that on the morning of the 
L9th of April, 1775, he was employed at his father's house in 
Cambridge — being then about five years old — in pouring pow- 
der into cartridges for the American soldiers.* 

And as it was in Massachusetts, Sir, so was it throughout all 
the other colonies. When Joseph Hawley's declaration — "We 
must fight " — (for it was from old Hampshire that this excla- 
mation first came) — was communicated to Patrick Henry of Vir- 
ginia, he instantly replied, as you all remember, with a solemn 
appeal to Heaven, " I am of that man's mind." And when the 
admirable Laurens, of South Carolina, just after his own release 
from a cruel confinement in the Tower of London, heard that 
' his gallant and glorious son, after receiving the capitulation of 
Cornwallis at Yorktown, had fallen in a skirmish with the ene- 
my, his more than Spartan language was, " I thank God I had 
a son who dared to die for his country." 

So truly did Joseph Warren write to Josiah Quincy in 1774, — 
" I am convinced that the true spirit of Liberty was never so 
universally diffused through all ranks and orders of people in 
any country on the face of the earth, as it is now through all 
North America." 

This, Mr. President, is the spirit which we this day commemo- 
rate ; a spirit, not local, not sectional, but which, by the help of 
God, made the thirteen Colonies independent of Great Britain, 
and gave political being to the United States of America. 

And now, Sir, let us not merely commemorate this spirit, as 
exhibited by our fathers. Let us cherish it in our hearts, and 
display it in our own lives, or, if need be, in our own deaths. 
Let the monuments which we have erected here or elsewhere, be 
not only tributes to the dead, but pledges, sacred pledges, on the 
part of the living. Our fathers have left monuments for them- 
* Here Dr. Walton rose tuid received the greetings of the wliole company. 



I 



MASSACHUSETTS IN 1775. 70 1 

selves, far more commensurate to their deeds and to their deserts, 
than any which we can build, — in the institutions which they 
have founded in the States, and in the Nation at large. Our 
common schools, our cliurchcs, our constitutions. State and Na- 
tional, our beloved Union, — these are their monuments. 

Let it be ours to keep them always in repair, always standing 
erect and unshaken, a tower and a castle for ourselves and our 
children, a refuge for the oppressed, whether flying I'roin an 
Austrian or an Australian prison, and a beacon for the friends 
of Liberty throughout the earth. May History never record — 
and here I borrow the words of Fisher Ames, and I ofl'er them 
as the sentiment with which to conclude my remarks, — 

May History never record of the Institutions of our Country, 
" that they were formed with too much wisdom to be valued, 
and required too much virtue to be maintained." 



NOTE TO PAGE .^ 



The personal allusion on this page was understood at the time to have referenec to 
Mr. CuARLES SuMXEii, who had just addressed the Convention in one of tliosc inflani- 
mator}- appeals on the subject of Slavery, by which he prepared tlie way lor his tinal 
secession from the Whig party. 

This gentleman, having failed, on this and other occasions, to provoke me into public 
controversy with himself, has thought fit to devote some twenty or thirty pages of the 
second volume of his recently published Orations and SjDceches, to a consideration of 
some passages of my public life. Fifteen of these pages are taken up liy a verbose 
and vituperative letter, dated October 26, 1846, and addressed to me personally, but of 
which no copy was ever sent to me, and which I only heard of l)y accident, sometime 
after its original puljlication, in a Free Soil or Abolition newspaper. 

It has been suggested to me, that some reply to this eft'usion miglit possibly be ex- 
pected in this A'olume. But I realh' must be excused from entering into controversy 
with Mr. Sumner. Sixteen or seventeen years of iDublie service must be left to be their 
own interin-cter, and to furnish their own answer to any amount of reckless perver- 
sion or Hippant personality. And, indeed, I may well be content to take my share of 
the abuse of a volume, which consigns President Fillmore to immortal •' infiimy," and 
which includes so many of the most distinguished men of both parties within tlic range 
of its sweeping fulminations. Tlic very most that I can persuade myself to do, is to 
append to this concluding Kote, as an act of simple justice to myself, my original 
reph- to another letter A\hich INIi". Sumner actually sent to me in August, 1846, when 
our correspondence terminated. 

Meantime, however, if anybody, at home or abroad, should desire to examine into the 
character or motives of his persevering attacks upon me, they will find ample materials, 
both in the foregoing speeches of mine, and in the record of his own subsequent poli- 
tical course, as it has been in process of curious development during the past year or 
two. 

Of this course, it is enough to say two tilings. One, that, having professed, vsqite 
ad nauseam, that lie was no politician and souglit no jilacc, he has grasped at office at 
the first instant at whicli it was within his reach, and under circumstances from whicli 
some, even, of his best political and personal friends recoiled. The other, tliat, having, 
for six or seven years past, arraigned and reproached almost all wlio liave preceded 
him in Congress from this quarter, for their alleged inaction on tiie subject of Slavery, 
and having just before liis own election, laid down a formal platform, — pledging him- 
self to demand " the instnnt repeal of the Fugitive Slave Bill,"' the Abolition of Slaveiy 



NOTE TO PAGE 360. 771 

in the District of Columljia and of the domestic Shu-e Ti-adc, tind the overthrow of 
tlie Shive Power, "so tliat tlie Federal fioveninicnt may l)e ])Ut openlv, activelv. and 
perpetually on the side of Freedom," — he has, since liis election, i;:n()red the entire 
subject, and has sat in his place in the Senate, for five months and a lialf, wiliiout ven- 
turing to open his lips on any question in any way connected witli if — and tliis. too, 
although the whole subject of the Coniproniises has liccn repeatedly under consideration 
by the Senate. How long this mysterious and jmident silence is to be observed, re- 
mains to be seen. It may, perhaps, have been broken, even lieforc this volume shall 
have made its appearance. And I doubt not, that, at some time or other, it will 1)C 
made the subject of a most plausible explanation. It is intimated, already, in some 
quarters, that he is only waitinj^ to gain influence at "Washington, in order to turn it more 
effectively against Southern Institutions. Personally, I cannot re<;ret tliat he lias laid 
aside, whether for a shorter or a longer time, the character of an Agitator, lie would 
do well to abandon it altogether. It is quite too late for him, liowcvcr, to explain away 
this signal " disloyalty to Freedom," as he has been accustomed to call it ; — and, what- 
ever the explanation may be, the fact will remam on the record, in most ridiculous, or, 
as some will think, in most lamentable contrast, both with his ferocious attacks upon 
others, and w'ith his fen'cnt professions for himself Non hoc poUkitus. 

But I hasten to dismiss a subject, whicli nothing but the recent repul)lication of liis 
unprovoked and offensive invectives, in the delil)erate and permanent form of a stere- 
otyped volume, could have induced nie to notice in any way whatever. 

The subjoined letter, which has never before been published, is given here precisely 
as it was originally -^viitten, the sentence inclosed in brackets, being that referred to in 
the Postscript. 

BosTOx, 17th August, 1846. 

Sir,— 

Your communication of the 10th instant, durcctedto Washington, reached mc here, at 
a late hour, on the day before yesterday. 

Some strange hallucination has come over either you or myself. It is certain that 
we do not agree as to what belongs to the intercourse of friends, or even of gentlemen. 

I have read afresh the newspaper articles of which you have informed me that you 
are the author, and I am only confinned in the opinion which I formed of them when 
they first met my eye. They seem to me to abound in the grossest perv^ersions, and in 
the coarsest personahties. They are not content with an-aigning my acts, but are full of 
insinuations as to my motives, and imputations on my integrity. They aiTogate for 
then- author an exclusive privilege of pronouncing upon matters both of tmth and of con- 
science, and deny to me all right of judgment as to either. They proceed upon the offen- 
sive assumption, that under some influence of ambition or moral cowardice, I have know- 
ingly and deliberately committed an unworthy and wicked act. They remonstrate 
with me, as with a confessed or convicted criminal. And they invoke upon me the 
reproach and scorn of the community, now and hereafter. [It would be difficult to say, 
which was the predominating element in these compositions, intolerance or insolence.] 

I am willing to believe that you have not weighed the force of your own phrases. 
Your ''periculosa facilitas" has betrayed you. Your habitual indulgence in strains of 
extravagant thought and exaggerated expression, alike when you praise and when you 
censure, has, perhaps, impaired your discrimmation in the employment of language. 
You must have been deaf, however, to every thing but the voices of admiration at your 
elbow, if you have not heard expressions of astonishment and indignation on all sules 
65 



772 NOTE TO PAGE 360. 

at the fanatical and frantic spirit which your articles exhihit, — not unmingled with 
regrets that tlieir wliole test and tenor should be so little in harmony with that cause 
of Peace, of which you are a zealous, and, I doubt not, a sincere advocate. 

I write for no purpose of returning railing for raiUng. I am quite ready to forgive 
the injury you have done me ; and I shall wish you nothing but success and happiness 
in your future career. But were I to maintain relations of social intercourse (as you 
propose) with one who lias thus grossly assailed my public morality, it would be an 
admission of the tinith of one of the charges which has been arrayed against me in 
this case. It might fau-ly be construed into an acknowledgment, that I recognized diifer- 
cnt nilcs of action for my private and my poUtical life. I feel compelled, therefore, to 
deeUne aU further communication or conference, while matters stand as they now do 
between us. 

Sir, I am conscious of having done nothing inconsistent with the cause of Preedom, 
of Right, of Humanity, of Truth, or even of Peace. I yield to no one in my attach- 
ment to one and all of these great interests. I am no stranger, either, to those Christian 
Churches, from which one of your articles would seem to excommunicate me ; nor do 
I know any thing in my moral or religious character, which should fairly subject me to 
be schooled even by yourself If by any vote I have given, I have wounded the con- 
science of anybody else, I sincerely regret it. I certainly have not wounded my own 
conscience. I well knew that my vote on the War Bill would expose me to misrepre- 
sentation. I felt painfully the peqdexity of the case. I freely acknowledge, that it 
was a doubtful question, upon which, as was well said by Mr. Charles Hudson and Mr. 
George Ashmun, (two of the fourteen,) in their printed speeches, " men of honesty of 
purpose might come to different conclusions." I ask no man to vindicate my vote, or 
to agree with me in opinion. I blame no man for charging me with error of judgment. 
But knowing for myself, that my vote was given honestly, conscientiously, with a sincere 
belief that it was the best vote which an arbitrary and overbearing majority would per- 
mit us to give, I shall allow no man to cast scandalous imputations on my motives and 
apply base epithets to my acts in public, and to call me his friend in private. My hand 
is not at the service of any one, who has denounced it with such ferocity, as being stained 
with blood. 

One or two of the topics in your last private communication, require a few words of 
notice, before this painful correspondence is brought to a close. 

1. I am utterly unconscious of having " scattered widely unambiguous voices of con- 
demnation " in regard to your Fourth of July Oration last year. I certainly differed 
entirely from some of the views of that address, and considered them to be disorgan- 
izing and dangerous. I never attacked you in a Newspaper. I never libelled your 
character or motives. Nor have I ever gone out of my way to say a word on the sub- 
ject. 

2. Nothing could be more utterly imfounded, —not even the preamble of the War 
Bill, — than your assertion that my sentiment, on that occasion, " set country above rkjhtP 
Such an assertion proves only, that in your haste to condemn, you have confounded 
Geography with Morals. 

3. Judge Story and myself had an hour of most friendly and cordial conversation 
Avithin one week of his lamented end. At Washington, I was in frequent consultation 
with him on the Texas question, as well as on other subjects, up to the very last mo- 
ment of his leaving there. If he would have arrested me, (as you intimate,) a few daj'^ 
before his death, in "tlie patli whicli I seemed to have adopted," it was owing either to 
his own misapprehensions, or to the misrepresentations of others. My path has been 



NOTE TO PAGE 360. 773 

one and tlic same, unchanged and unoliangealde, from tlie moment I entered public life 
to the jircsent moment. 

4. I have the strongest reason to think that Judge Story and myself ngired entirely 
as to some of the more uUra doctrines of your address, ami, unless I havi- been greatly 
misinformed, he exjjrcssed himself without reserve as to their imiiracticablf and extra- 
vagant character. , 

5. You cite the opinions of many anonymous persons in favor of your views of inv 
vote. I am quite willing that its projjriety should he tested pondcre non uumtro. And 
opportunities may still occur, when it may he seen, whether there was not a weight of 
character in my favor, against which the gross charges of " lie," " falsehood," " immo- 
rality," "wickedness," and the rest, will strive in vain to prevail. 

And now I must repeat the expression of my sincere regret at bcin;; compelled to 

address you in such terms. I had no purpose of entering into any public controversy 

with you, or any one else, in relation to my vote ; nor have I now. Nor should I have 

written to you at all, but for your own letters to me. I will still hope that the day may 

not he distant, when you may realize that you have wronged me, and when our old 

relations may he resumed without the sacrifice of our own self-respect. 

Yours respectfully, 

lioBEaa' C. WjNTiiRor. 
Chakles Sumnek, Esq. 

r. S. As I am just leaving home for a week's relaxation at Newport, it is impossi- 
hle for me to rewrite this letter. I might otherwise have omitted a sentence over ^\hieh 
I have drawn my pen, as I am as little disposed to give ol!ence as to take it. 



THE END. 



^ 






II 



J 



